244 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. [CHAP. VIII. 



things are made to have a certain community of type, and 

 that which induces human artists to make a set of different 

 things according to varieties of the same model. Here 

 apparently the final cause is analogy or homogeneity, to the 

 exclusion of usefulness. ^.-; 



" And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals 

 bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathe- 

 matical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, 

 usefulness or moral significance, nothing but spherical trigo- 

 nometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have 

 blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from 

 the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt 

 about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are 

 those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of 

 mind are fabricated for it by matter." 



9. Autobiography. (Dated) 8th March 1856. 

 Is Autobiography possible ? 



Under the guise of an ironical paradox, that all biography 

 is (1) impossible, (2) inevitable, Maxwell recommends the 

 simple record of facts, and deprecates the method of intro- 

 spection. Of many shrewd remarks occurring in the course 

 of this essay, the following are the most noticeable : 



"... When a man once begins to make a theory of 

 himself, he generally succeeds in making himself into a 

 theory. 



"... The truthfulness of the biography depends quite 

 as much upon the relations which subsisted between the 

 author and his subject, as upon his fidelity in collecting 

 authentic accounts of his actions. 



"... It will be found that the motives under which 

 the celebrated characters of history have acted, are, whether 

 good or bad, pretty much of the same order of refinement, as 

 long as we gather them from the same historian. It is when 

 we pass from one historian to another that we discover 

 a new order of motives, both in the good and the bad 

 characters. 



"... People do not talk of you, or if they do, they 



