en. ii.] THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY. 29 



and space which does not resist. Later in life, our intellectual 

 education consists still in the progressive grouping of ex- 

 periences. That portion of it which we habitually designate 

 as practical consists in the more and more complete distribu- 

 tion of ends (as variously desirable or undesirable), and of 

 the relations between ends and means ; while the education 

 which we more especially characterize as theoretical consists 

 in the more and more complete distribution of era acquired 

 notions into well-defined groups, mathematical, pnysical, or 

 physiological, legal or ethical. He who has so distinctly 

 classified his experiences of the connections between certain 

 courses of action and the resulting feelings of happiness or 

 misery that he can usually decide upon any line of conduct 

 with a clear perception of its consequences, is what we call a 

 prudent man, or a man of sound judgment. While, as Mr. 

 Mill has somewhere observed, that man is most completely 

 educated who has the clearest sense of the connotations of 

 the words which he uses ; who understands most thoroughly 

 and feels most keenly the fine shades of distinction between 

 allied groups of conceptions, which less perfectly educated 

 persons are liable to confuse together and to reason about as 

 if they constituted but a single group. Such a man possesses 

 what Sainte-Beuve calls the sense of nuance ; an intellectual 

 characteristic which is, perhaps, nowhere more habitually 

 exemplified than in the charming pages of that most con- 

 summate of critics. 



And this leads me to observe — what indeed the whole of 

 the above survey implies — that since knowledge is classifica- 

 tion, the completeness of the classification varies with the 

 degree of intelligence. Minds in a low stage of development 

 can distinguish only between widely-contrasted phenomena. 

 The classifications of which they are capable consist of but 

 few groups, indefinite in their extent and incoherent in their 

 materials ; while the progressive increase of intelligence 

 consists in the progressive establishment of sub- classes of 



