Some remarks of Ella Wheeler Wilcox under this head will bear quoting: “Human thinking is still in as great a state of disorder and jumble as language was before the alphabet, music before the scale was discovered, printing before Gutenberg, or mathematics before Pythagoras formulated its laws.” “This systematization of all thought,” she tells us, would be “a more far reaching improvement than all the others, for it will do for education, health, economics, government, etc., what the alphabet did for language, movable type for printing and literature, the scale for music, and the rules of arithmetic for calculation. Being the exact counterpart of these in its particular field, its mission, like theirs, will be to bring order out of chaos.” I believe Miss Wilcox exaggerates matters. Incidentally I for one do not pretend to have discovered anything revolutionary. But the importance of the subject warrants its formulation into as near scientific form as we can bring it. I beg no one to get frightened. Science does not necessarily mean test tubes and telescopes. I mean science in its broadest sense; and in this sense it means nothing more than organized knowledge. If we are to find rules and methods of procedure, these methods must come from somewhere—must be based on certain principles—and these principles can come only from close, systematic investigation. It may indeed be urged that we can think best by disregarding all “rules,” by not paying any attention to method. But the man who maintains this must give reasons; and once he attempts this he himself is bordering closely on the science of the matter. In short, the settlement of even this question is part of the science of thinking. And what is to be the nature of this science? For our purposes, all sciences may be divided into two kinds: _positive_ and _normative_. A positive science investigates the nature of things as they are. It deals simply with matters of fact. Such a science is physics, chemistry, psychology. A normative science is one which studies things as they ought to be. As the name implies, it seeks to establish a _norm_ or pattern which ought to be adhered to. It studies means of reaching desired ends. To this class belong such sciences as ethics, education, agriculture. Now these normative sciences, with the exception of ethics, are nearly always referred to either as “arts” or “applied sciences.” To both of these terms I technically but strenuously object. I object to the term “art” to designate any set of organized rules for doing a thing, because “art” also means the actual doing of that thing. And this thing may be done, and often is done, in total ignorance of the rules governing it. A man may possess the art of swimming—he may be able to swim—without any previous instruction, without any knowledge of how he ought to hold his body, arms and legs; just as a dog may do the same thing.