The Higher Usefulness of Science 



logically regarded, they are just as important attri- 

 butes of a particular class of machines as the number 

 and shape of the cylinders; and second, the fact that 

 using the marks in the way we do is purely descriptive, 

 so far as concerns the recognition of an individual ma- 

 chine, but is definitive in so far as that machine is 

 differentiated from any other kind of machine. Had 

 there never been more than one automobile made, so 

 that then there could be no question of distinguishing 

 it from others of its kind, the windows would still be no 

 less positive and real, though, manifestly, they would 

 not then; furnish distinguishing traits within the general 

 class automobiles. But here there comes to view a dif- 

 ference of the utmost importance between the way at- 

 tributes are definitive of man-made objects like auto- 

 mobiles, and natural living objects like men. In the 

 first class of objects we are perfectly sure that many, 

 usually most, of the attributes which the old logic 

 would call accidents had no genuinely dependent rela- 

 tion to most of the other attributes of the object; while 

 in living beings, especially of the higher classes, we are 

 now certain that the great majority, if not all, the 

 attributes, even those which formal logic would call 

 accidents, are in vital relation with many, usually very 

 many, other attributes. Thus recurring to the shapes 

 of back curtain windows in automobiles and freckles on 

 the nose of our hypothetical island mother, we know 

 that the former have no fundamental relation to the 

 more essential attributes of the machines, as, for ex- 



