NECM'SSABY TB urns— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 647 



series among themselves. The first steps in most of the 

 sciences are jjurely classificatory. Where facts fall easily 

 into rich and intricate series (as plants and animals and 

 chemical compounds do), the mere sight of the series fills 

 the mind with a satisfaction sui generis ; and a world whose 

 real materials naturally lend themselves to serial classifi- 

 cation is pro fanfo a more rational world, a world with 

 which the mind will feel more intimate, than with a world 

 in which they do not. By the pre-evolutionary naturalists, 

 whose generation has hardly passed away, classifications 

 were supposed to be ultimate insights into God's mind, 

 filling us with adoration of his ways. The fact that 

 Nature lets us make them was a proof of the presence of 

 his Thought in her bosom. So far as the facts of expe- 

 rience can not be serially classified, therefore, so far ex- 

 perience fails to be rational in one of the ways, at least, 

 which we crave. 



THE LOGIC-SERIES. 



Closely akin to the function of comparison is that of 

 judging, predicating, or subsuming. In fact, these elemen- 

 tary intellectual functions run into each other so, that it 

 is often only a question of practical convenience whether 

 we shall call a given mental oj)eration by the name of 

 one or of the other. Comparisons result in groups 

 of like things ; and presently (through discrimination and 

 abstraction) in conceptions of the respects in which the 

 likenesses obtain. The groups are genera or classes, the 

 respects are characters or atti'ihutes. The attributes again 

 may be compared, forming genera of higher orders, and 

 their characters singled out ; so that we have a new sort 

 of series, that of predication, or of kind including kind. Thus 

 horses are quadrupeds, quadrupeds animals, animals 

 machines, machines liable to wear out, etc. In such a 

 series as this the several couplings of terms may have 

 been made out originally at widely difi'erent times and 

 under different circumstances. But memory may bring 

 them together afterwards ; and whenever it does so, our 

 I'acult}' of apprehending serial increase makes us conscious 



