THE RESULTS OF ABSTRACTION IN SCIENCE. 827 



scientific discussions, and has such a broad bearing upon their decision, 

 that it may well claim our attention. 



Abstraction is necessary to all knowledge. As soon as we advance 

 at all beyond the knowledge of concretes as soon even as we begin 

 to compare one thing with another, and note their resemblances and 

 differences so soon we commence the process of abstraction and gen- 

 eralization. This mental act is not only the foundation of all conscious 

 classification, but it is itself the infancy of consciousness. The earliest 

 perception of resemblance in two objects which, next to the perception 

 of difference, is the lowest term to which consciousness can be reduced, 

 and which probably appeared contemporaneously with organized mat- 

 ter, was the result of incipient abstraction. The likeness of two things 

 not identical, but resembling each other in many respects, would be 

 perceived by any being possessed of the least consciousness. As the 

 differences increase and the resemblances decrease in number, it is 

 only by a thinking away from (abstracting) the differences and con- 

 fining: the attention to the resemblances, that classification com- 

 mences. 



One of the greatest difficulties in dealing with the early growth of 

 consciousness is the lack of terms applicable to it. Man commences to 

 philosophize only when he is far advanced in culture, and the terms 

 he then uses are ill fitted to express the mental acts of men far below 

 him in intelligence, and in a still greater degree of those lowest orders 

 of animals in whom consciousness first appears. However ill they may 

 express our meaning, we are confined to the words we have, and they 

 must be accepted as indicating but in a slight degree the mental pro- 

 cess going on in the early organisms. When we speak of the abstrac- 

 tion necessary to the perception of resemblance, it is of course to be 

 understood that the process is but slightly analogous to the classifi- 

 cation of the scientist ; still, fundamentally it is the same. For long 

 ages before man appeared upon the earth this unthinking classification 

 was going on. A brain was gradually being developed which had im- 

 pressed upon it the experiences of its myriad ancestors, and which 

 furnished to the primitive man an instrument of thought enabling him 

 to adapt himself to surrounding conditions with far more success than 

 his less favored compeers. The seons during which man struggled 

 with the forces of nature, all the while gaining slight increments of 

 experience and knowledge of nature's laws which he transmitted to his 

 descendants, were necessary to the production of the Greek philosopher 

 who, from his highly specialized mind, could evolve a theory of the 

 universe. Ignorant of the vast ancestry of human experience, it is no 

 wonder that men should have been ready to accept any but the true 

 explanation of our belief in the laws of nature, and should have been 

 unable to discern any relationship between those laws which to them 

 appeared necessary and immutable and those newly discovered laws 

 or sequences which they believed might be easily set aside. 



