Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2777

Item typed and preserved by Heath from “The Science of Language” by Friedrich Max Mueller. Lines 23-27 and 31-36, marked in pencil in the margin, are here printed in bold to identify them.

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The Classificatory Stage

But to return to our survey of the history of the physical sciences. We had examined the empirical stage through which ev­ery science has to pass. We saw that, for instance, in botany, a man who has travelled through distant countries, who has col­lected a vast number of plants, who knows their names, their peculiarities, their medicinal qualities, is not a botanist but only a herbalist — a lover of plants, or what the Italians call a dilettante, from dilettare, to delight in a subject. The real science of plants, like every other science, begins with the work of classification. An empirical acquaintance with plants rises to a scientific knowledge of plants when the mind discov­ers beneath the multiplicity of single productions the unity of an organic system. This discovery is made by means of compari­son and classification. We cease to study each flower for its own sake; and by continually enlarging the sphere of our ob­servation, we try to discover what is common to many and offers those essential points on which groups or natural classes may be established. These classes again, in their more general fea­tures, are mutually compared; new points of difference, or of a similarity of a more general and higher character, spring to view, and enable us to discover classes of classes, or families. And when the whole kingdom of plants has thus been surveyed, and a simple tissue of names been thrown over the whole garden of nature; when we can lift it up, as it were, and view it in our mind as a whole, as a system well defined and complete, we then speak of the science of plants, or botany. We have entered into altogether a new sphere of knowledge, where the individual is subject to the general, fact to law; we discover thought, order and purpose pervading the whole realm of nature, and we seem to perceive the dark chaos of matter lighted up by the reflection of a divine mind. Such views may be right or wrong. Too hasty comparisons, or too narrow distinctions, may have prevented the eye of the observer from discovering the broad outline of nature’s plan. Yet every system, however insufficient it may prove here­after, is a step in advance. If the mind of man is once impressed with the conviction that there must be order and law everywhere, it never rests again until all that seems irregular has been elim­inated, until the full beauty and harmony of nature has been re­vealed, and the eye of man has, as it were, caught the eye of God beaming out from the midst of all his works. The failures of the past prepare the triumphs of the future.

From “The Science of Language,” by Friedrich Max Mueller.