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

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Classification of the Sciences

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burning matter may itself become incandescent, or its heat may serve to render another more suitable thing incandescent, as in the Welsbash burner. Here is a complication which will ordinarily be advantageous, since by not making the same thing fulfill the two functions of supplying heat to render produce incandescence of itself incandescing one of incandescing upon being heated, there is more freedom to choose things suitable to the two functions. This is a good example of that sort of natural class which Agassiz called an order; that is, a class created by a useful complication of a general plan.

Desire always Vague

Closely connected with the fact that every desire is general, are two other facts very [?] which must be taken into account in considering purposive classes. The first of these is that a desire is always more or less variable, or vague. For example, a man wants an economical lamp. Then if he burns oil in it, he will endeavor to burn that oil which gives him sufficient light at the lowest cost. But another man, who lives a little further from the source of supply

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of that oil and a little nearer to the source of another a different oil may find that different oil to be the better for him. So it is with the desires of one individual. The same man who prefers veal to pork as a general thing, may think that an occasional spare rib is better than having cold boiled veal every day of his life. In short, variety is the spice of life for the individual, and practically still more so for a large number of individuals; and as far as we can compare Nature's ways with ours, she seems to be even more given to variety than me. These three cases may be very different on their subjective side; but for purposes of classification they are equivalent.

Desire always has Longitude

But not only is desire general and vague, or indeterminate, it has besides a certain longitude, or third dimension. By this I mean that while a certain ideal state of things might most perfectly satisfy a desire, yet a situation somewhat differing from that will be far better than nothing; and in general,

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wen a state is not too far from the ideal state, the nearer it approaches that state the better. Moreover, the situation of things most satisfactory to one desire is almost never the situation most satisfactory to another. A brighter lamp than that I use would perhaps be more agreeable to my eyes; but it would be less so to my pocket, to my lungs, and to my sense of heat. Accordingly, a compromise is struck; and since all these desires concerned are somewhat vague, the result is that the objects actually will cluster about certain middling qualities, some being removed this way, some that way, and at greater and greater removes fewer and fewer objects will be so determined. Thus clustering distributions will characterize purposive classes.

Natural classes not always definitely distinguished.

One consequence of this deserves particular notice, since it will concern us a good deal in our classification of the sciences, and yet is quite usually overlooked and assumed not be as it is. Namely, it follows that it may

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be quite impossible to draw a sharp line of demarcation between two classes, although they are real and natural classes in the strictest truth. Namely this will happen when the form about which the individuals of one class cluster is not so unlike the form about which individuals of another class cluster but that variations from each middling form may precisely agree. In such a case, we may know in regard to any intermediate form what proportion of the objects of the form belong had one purpose and what proportion the other, but unless we have some supplementary information we cannot tell which ones had one purpose and which the other. The reader may be disposed to suspect that this is merely a mathematician's fancy, and that no such case would be likely ever to occur. But he may be assured that such things occurrences are far from being rare. I will mention one In order to satisfy him that this state ot things does occur, I will

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The Kets of Naucratis

mention an incontestable instance of it,incontestible, at least, by any fair-minded competent to deal with the problem. Prof. Flinders Petrie, whose reasoning powers I had admired long before his other great scientific qualities had been proved, among which his great exactitude and circumspection as a metrologist concerns us here, exhumed, at the ancient trading town of Naucratis, no less than 158 balance-weights having the Egyptian ket as their unit. * The great majority of them are of basalt and syenite, material so unchangeable that the corrections needed to bring them to their original values are small. I shall deal only with 144 of them from each of which Mr. Petrie has calculated the value of the ket to a tenth of a Troy grain. Since these values range all the way from 137 to 152 grains, it is evident that they represent the weights were intended to be copies of several different standards, probably four or five; for there is would be no use of weighing a balance, if one can could detect the errors of the balance-weights by simply half "hefting" them, and comparing them with one's memory of the standard weight. From what Considering that there

* Egyptian Exploration Fund. Third Memoir. p.

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