MS 427a (1902) - Minute Logic - Chapter II - Section I

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ralization broad, luminous, and solid must enter to into an intellectual performance in order to command much respect admiration. Such generalization, which teaches a new and clear lesson upon the truth of which reliance can be placed, requires to be drawn from many specimens. We shall endeavor, in that way, to define each class, that is to enumerate characters which are absolutely decisive as to whether a given individual does or does not belong to the class. But it may be, as out kets show, that this is altogether out of the question; and the fact that two classes merge is no proof that they are not truly distinct natural classes.

{Section title: Natural Classification essentially a Study of Genesis}

For they may, nevertheless, be genealogically distinct, just as no degree of resemblance between two men is proof positive that they are brothjers. Now genealogical classification, amont those objects of which the genesis is genealogical, is the classification

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we can most certainly rely as being natural. No harm will be done if, in those cases, we define the natural classification as the genealogical classification; or, at least, that we make the genealogical character one of the essential characters of a natural classification. It cannot be more; because if we had before us ranged in ancestral order all the intermediate forms through which the human stock has passed in developing from non-man into man, it is plain that other considerations would be necessary in determining (if it admitted of determination) at what point in the series the forms began to merit the name of human. The sciences are, in part, produced each from others. Thus, spectroscopic astronomy has for its parents, astronomy, chemistry, and optics. But this is not the whole genesis nor the principal part of the genesis of any broad and

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definite science. It has its own peculiar problem springing from an idea. That geometry derived its birth from land-surveying is the tradition, which is borne out by the assertion tradition that it took its origin in Egypt where the yearly floods must have rendered accurate surveying of special importance. Moreover the wonderful accuracy of the dimensions of the great pyramid exhibit a degree of skill in laying out ground which could only have been attained by great intellectual activity; and this activity could hardly fail to lead to some beginnings of geometry. We may, therefore, accept with considerable confidence the tradition involved in the very name of geometry. Speaking in a braod, rough way, it may be said that the sciences have grown out of the useful arts, or out of arts supposed to be useful. Astronomy out of astrology,

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physiology, by taking medicine as a halfway, out of magic; chemistry out of alchemy, thermotics from the steam engine, etc. Among the theoretical sciences, while some of the most abstract have sprung straight from the concretest arts, there is nevertheless a well marked tendency for a science to be first descriptive, later classificatory, and lastly to embrace all classes in one law. The classificatory state may be skipped. Yet in the true order of development, the generation proceeds quite in the other direction. You Men may and do begin to study the different kinds of animals and plants before they know anything of the general laws of physiology. But they cannot attain any true [know?] understanding of taxonomic biology until they can be guided by the discoveries of the physiologists. Till then the study of mollusks will be nothing but such conchology. On the other hand the physiologist may be aided by a fact or two here and there drawn from taxonomic biology;

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but he asks but little and that little not very urgently of anything that the taxonomist can tell him and that he could not find out for himself. All natural classification is then essentially, [well?] we may almost say, an attempt to find out the true genesis of the objects classified. But by genesis must be understood not the efficient action which produces the whole by producing the parts because they are needed to make the whole. Genesis is production from ideas. It may be difficult to understand how this is true in the biological world, though there is proof enough that it is so. But in regard to science it is a proposition easily enough intelligible. A science is defined by its problem; and its problem is clearly formulated on the basis of abstracter science.

This is all I intended to say here concerning classification, in general.