Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 2 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 2 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
As this observation suggests, it will be well, before tracing the
mode in which exact science emerges from the inexact judgments of the
senses, and showing the non-serial evolution of its divisions, to note
the non-serial character of those preliminary processes of which all
after development is a continuation. On re-considering them it will
be seen that not only are they divergent branches {40} from a common
root,—not only are they simultaneous in their growth; but that they
are mutual aids; and that none can advance without the rest. That
progress of classification for which the unfolding of the perceptions
paves the way, is impossible without a corresponding progress in
language, by which greater varieties of objects are thinkable and
expressible. On the one hand classification cannot be carried far
without names by which to designate the classes; and on the other hand
language cannot be made faster than things are classified. Again,
the multiplication of classes and the consequent narrowing of each
class, itself involves a greater likeness among the things classed
together; and the consequent approach towards the notion of complete
likeness itself allows classification to be carried higher. Moreover,
classification necessarily advances _pari passu_ with rationality—the
classification of _things_ with the classification of _relations_.
For things that belong to the same class are, by implication, things
of which the properties and modes of behaviour—the co-existences and
sequences—are more or less the same; and the recognition of this
sameness of co-existences and sequences is reasoning. Whence it follows
that the advance of classification is necessarily proportionate to the
advance of generalizations. Yet further, the notion of _likeness_,
both in things and relations, simultaneously evolves by one process of
culture the ideas of _equality_ of things and _equality_ of relations;
which are the respective bases of exact concrete reasoning and exact
abstract reasoning—Mathematics and Logic. And once more, this idea of
equality, in the very process of being formed, necessarily gives origin
to two series of relations—those of magnitude and those of number; from
which arise geometry and the calculus. Thus the process throughout
is one of perpetual subdivision and perpetual intercommunication of
the divisions. From the very first there has been that _consensus_ of
different kinds of knowledge, {41} answering to the _consensus_ of the
intellectual faculties, which, as already said, must exist among the
sciences.
Let us now go on to observe how, out of the notions of _equality_ and
_number_, as arrived at in the manner described, there gradually arose
the elements of quantitative prevision.
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