ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF BOOKS. 42 o 



Simple as is this arraugement in tlie whole, there arc many obstacles to its 

 perfect application in detail, but none of them insurmountable. 



Financial science, for instance, including- pamphlets on free trade and tariff, 

 stands intermediate bcitween manufactures and commerce, dealing with both. 

 Its treatment is, however, necessaril}^ fundamental, involving the most recondite 

 principles of sociology. It is sociology in one of its governmental aspects. It 

 has, in all ages, been considered as the main body of the science of government. 

 It is in fact political economy. Unfortunately for the world, but fortunately for 

 the arrangement of libraries, benevolence and religion are not considered suffi- 

 ciently allied to politics to make any close connexion between the sixth and 

 seventh classes necessary, except through law and language. 



There is still another reason for throwing finance into the first and general 

 division of political economy (G^), as books which cannot go either into botany 

 or zoology are placed in natural history. 



Manufactures and the mechanic arts (6^), as has been already said above, are 

 grouped together, and involve the building of steam-engines, steamboats, canals, 

 and railroads, and therefore the discussion of steam as a poAver. 



For a similar reason, under commerce (6"') come the subjects of money, coins, 

 and medals, although the science of money value belongs with finance in jjolitical 

 economy, and medals ought to go into archfeology and history. 



Legislation is in like manner grouped with law (G''), although it carries a far 

 wider range, and is, in fact, the science of applied sociology — the effort to 

 embody social ideas of every hind in statute form. Its relation to history, also. 

 is very intimate. 



While this sixth class is apparently the simplest of all in its arrangement, ir 

 is in reality the most confused and difficult to adjust, as it is by far the most, 

 important of all in the number of its titles. 



Class VII. The class of sciences of which language forms the first division 

 (7M> places us, on leaving the world of the social sciences, in the Avorld of man',^ 

 highest and largest relationships — as an individual, with other beings as indi- 

 viduals, and M'ith ideas as if they were individual beings. Sociology is the 

 language of societies; language is the sociology of man's allied intelligences. 

 The science of language is the mathematics of the soul. Language, as the 

 analogue of pure mathematics, is the science of man's power to express his 

 thoughts and feelings. Its ajD^^lications, therefore, are to belles-lettres (7^), the 

 fine art3 (7'*), ethics (7^), education (7''), and worship or religion (7*^.) These 

 are all parts of speech. They are the utterances of successively higher and 

 higher elemental and essential forces of the being. Contracting their areas as 

 they ascend, they terminate in a highest point, where the one man regards the 

 one God. This is the end of the sciences. Here is no more language, but 

 silence. Nothing can follow but retrospection and personal narration, which is 

 biography, destined to stand by itself, as Class VIII, at the end, as general 

 science stood by itself, as Class I, at the beginning. 



Under ethics (7**) are put books of metaphysics, so called for the convenience 

 of the consultcr. They strictly belong in language, being nothing else than 

 books of the natural history of the mind; but no one would be likely to look 

 for them there. Some may object that metaphysics has not been named the first 

 division of the class of spiritual sciences. If the word had not been perverted 

 from its best and widest meaning, and reduced to the denomination of a specialty, 

 the mere classification of the faculties of the mind, it might have stood in that 

 position. But even then the symmetry of the arrangement would liaA-e been 

 lost — the opening of language, the advance through poetry, sculpture, music, 

 and logic, to ethics and the works of virtue, to metaphysical understanding, to 

 Christian faith and hope, and to the personal intercourse with God in praise and 

 prayer. 



Under education (7''), the instruction of the deaf and dumb, the blind, and 



