ORGANIZATION OF THE SCIENCES 



been made upon purely logical grounds ; and 

 no attempt has been made to express the order 

 of historic progression, simply because, as I 

 have already shown, that order cannot be ex- 

 pressed by any linear series. If we were to re- 

 present the respective rates of progress in the 

 different sciences by a device familiar to statis- 

 ticians, — denoting the sciences by a series of 

 curves, starting from the same point, and con- 

 structed with reference to a common abscissa ; 

 marking off the abscissa into equal sections and 

 sub-sections answering to centuries and decades ; 

 and expressing the progress of each science at 

 each decade by the length of the ordinate erected 

 at the corresponding sub-section, — we should 

 see these curves from first to last intersecting 

 each other in the most complicated and appar- 

 ently capricious manner. Probably the only 

 conspicuously persistent relation would be that 

 between the entire set of curves representing the 

 concrete organic sciences, and all the rest of the 

 curves taken together ; of which two sets the 

 former would, on the whole, have the shorter 

 ordinates. 



But on sufficiently close inspection we should 

 detect, between the sets of curves representing 

 the abstract, the abstract-concrete, and the con- 

 crete sciences, a relation equally constant, and 

 far more interesting, though less conspicuous. 

 We should observe that all along the progress 



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