MIND AS A MEASURE OF NATURE. 681 



ture. Those who have the disposal of the superfluous produce of the 

 country should employ their wealth not in refining material enjoy- 

 ments, or in stimulating the unhealthy gratifications of vanity and 

 pride, but in works of general utility, as many an American citizen 

 and more than one European sovereign have done. 



MIND AS A MEASURE OF NATURE. 



By CHAELES T. HAVILAND. 



IT has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristote- 

 lian. This is an epigrammatic way of stating the fact that the gen- 

 eral tendency in the pursuit of knowledge is to approach it from one or 

 the other of two different standpoints, variously called the subjective 

 and the objective ; the mental and the material ; the theological, or 

 metaphysical, and the scientific. While this tendency is pretty clearly 

 marked, yet the saying has the fault common to most apothegms, of 

 sacrificing correctness to brevity of overlooking the delicate grada- 

 tions in Nature's continuity in its attempt to express her more salient 

 diversities in a pithy utterance. This is the imperfection of all classi- 

 fications. They necessarily separate what is continuous. It is only as 

 they refer to genetic relationships that they most nearly correspond 

 with nature, and this they can do in only a few of the natural sciences. 

 For the most part, the act of classifying is the application of a mental 

 scale to incommensurable quantities. The very impossibility of group- 

 ing phenomena into natural kinds renders an artificial classification 

 necessary. Before science can advance a single step, the innumerable 

 phenomena of nature must be reduced into classes. If not susceptible 

 of natural arrangement, they must be arranged artificially ; and, as 

 long as the artificial chai'acter of the classification is comprehended, no 

 harm is done ; but when men, with but little knowledge of the objects 

 dealt with, proceed to construct a procrustean bed to which they ex- 

 jDCct Nature to conform, and then, from this tortured witness, attempt 

 to extort unwilling testimony, they may expect Science to enter a de- 

 murrer. As this method, however, has the merit of simplicity, as 

 might be expected, it has long been the favorite with a certain class of 

 philosophers. 



Turning back to the early progress of human speculation, especially 

 so far as it has reference to material objects, we see that all the first 

 attempts at physical knowledge consisted, principally, of deductions 

 from mental notions, with but little, if any, reference to phenomena. 

 Beginning with the theories of the universe propounded by the Greek 

 philosophers, we see that whatsoever progress was made in scientific 

 acquisition was only in proportion to the occasional reactions from the 



