Your Mind and How to Use It: A Manual of Practical PsychologyAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Your Mind and How to Use It: A Manual of Practical Psychology
Atkinson, William Walker
Psychology
The fourth step in conception is that of classification or
generalization, whereby we place individual things in a mental bundle or
class, and then this bundle in company with other bundles into a higher
class, and so on. Thus we group all the individual small birds having
certain characteristics into a species, then several related species
into a larger family, and this into a still larger, until finally we
group all the bird families into the great family which we call "birds"
and of which the simple term "bird" expresses the general concept.
Jevons says: "We classify things together whenever we observe that they
are like each other in any respect, and therefore think of them
together. In classifying a collection of objects, we do not merely put
together into groups those which resemble each other, but we also divide
each class into smaller ones in which the resemblance is more complete.
Thus the class of _white substances_ may be divided into those which are
solid, and those which are fluid, so that we get the two minor classes
of solid-white and fluid-white substances. It is desirable to have names
by which to show that one class is contained in another, and,
accordingly, we call the class which is divided into two or more smaller
ones the _genus_, and the smaller ones into which it is divided, the
_species_."
Every _species_ is a small family of the individuals composing it, and
at the same time is an individual species of the genus just above it;
the _genus_, in turn, is a family of several species, and at the same
time an individual genus in the greater family or genus above it.
The student may familiarize himself with the idea of generalization by
considering himself as an individual, John Smith. John represents that
unit of generalization. The next step is to combine John with the other
Smiths of his immediate family. Then this family may be grouped with his
near blood relations, and so on, until finally all the related Smiths,
near and remote, are grouped together in a great Smith family.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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