This precept (repeated by Plato also in the Politikus) respecting the principles of classification, deserves notice. It protests against, and seeks to modify, one of the ordinary turns in the associating principles of the human mind. With unreflecting men, classification is often emotional rather than intellectual. The groups of objects thrown together in such minds, and conceived in immediate association, are such as suggest the same or kindred emotions: pleasure or pain, love or hatred, hope or fear, admiration, contempt, disgust, jealousy, ridicule. Community of emotion is a stronger bond of association between different objects, than community in any attribute not immediately interesting to the emotions, and appreciable only intellectually. Thus objects which have nothing else in common, except appeal to the same earnest emotion, will often be called by the same general name, and will be constituted members of the same class. To attend to attributes in any other point of view than in reference to the amount and kind of emotion which they excite, is a process uncongenial to ordinary taste: moreover, if any one brings together, in the same wording, objects really similar, but exciting opposite and contradictory emotions, he usually provokes either disgust or ridicule. All generalizations, and all general terms connoting them, are results brought together by association and comparison of particulars somehow resembling. But if we look at the process of association in an unreflecting person, the resemblances which it fastens upon will be often emotional, not intellectual: and the generalizations founded upon such resemblances will be emotional also. It is against this natural propensity that Plato here enters his protest, in the name of intellect and science. For the purpose of obtaining a classification founded on real, intrinsic affinities, we must exclude all reference to the emotions: we must take no account whether a thing be pleasing or hateful, sublime or mean:[24] we must bring ourselves to rank objects useful or grand in the same logical compartment with objects hurtful or ludicrous. We must examine only whether the resemblance is true and real, justifying itself to the comparing intellect: and whether the class-term chosen be such as to comprise all these resemblances, holding them apart ([Greek: mo/non e)che/tô chôri\s]) from the correlative and opposing class.[25] [Footnote 24: Compare Politikus, p. 266 D; Parmenidês, p. 130 E. We see that Plato has thus both anticipated and replied to the objection of Socher (Ueber Platon's Schriften, pp. 260-262), who is displeased with the minuteness of this classification, and with the vulgar objects to which it is applied. Socher contends that this is unworthy of Plato, and that it was peculiar to the subtle Megaric philosophers.