CHAPTER XII 



THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES 



^ I. — Summary as to the Material of Science 



In the first chapter of this Grammar we saw that science 

 claims for its heritage the whole domain to which the 

 word knowledge can be legitimately applied ; that it 

 refuses to admit any co-heirs to its possessions, and asserts 

 that its own slow and laborious processes of research are 

 the sole profitable modes of cultivation, the only tillage 

 from which we can reach a harvest of truth unchoked by 

 dogmatic tares. In the further course of our volume we 

 have seen that knowledge is essentially a description and 

 not an explanation^ — that the object of science is to de- 

 scribe in conceptual shorthand the routine of our past 

 experience, with a view of predicting our future experience. 

 The work of science viewed from the psychological stand- 

 point is thus essentially that of association, and from the 

 physical standpoint the development of the various ex- 

 citatory connections between the several portions of the 

 cortex or the centres of brain activity. We have im- 

 mediate sense-impressions ; these are in part retained as 

 stored sense-impresses, and are capable of being revived 

 by kindred immediate sense-impressions. From the stored 

 sense-impresses we form by association conceptions, which 

 may or may not be real limits to perceptual processes. 

 These conceptions are in the latter case only ideal symbols, 

 conceptual shorthand by aid of which we index or classify 

 immediate sense -impressions, stored sense -impresses, or 

 other conceptions themselves. This is the process of 



