ecause he wrote only songs or odes and never
attempted drama or epic. These various opinions point to different
conceptions of what constitutes greatness in poets, different
connotations of "great poet". Comparing different opinions concerning
"education" we may be led to ask whether it means more than
instruction in the details of certain subjects, whether it does not
also import the formation of a disposition to learn or an interest in
learning or instruction in a certain method of learning.

Historically, dialectic turning on the use of words preceded the
attempt to formulate principles of Definition, and attempts at precise
definition led to Division and Classification, that is to systematic
arrangement of the objects to be defined. Attempt to define any such
word as "education," and you gradually become sensible of the needs in
respect of method that forced themselves upon mankind in the history
of thought. You soon become aware that you cannot define it by itself
alone; that you are beset by a swarm of more or less synonymous words,
_instruction_, _discipline_, _culture_, _training_, and so on; that
these various words represent distinctions and relations among things
more or less allied; and that, if each must be fixed to a definite
meaning, this must be done with reference to one another and to the
whole department of things that they cover.

The first memorable attempts at scientific arrangement were
Aristotle's treatises on Ethics and Politics, which had been the
subjects of active dialectic for at least a century before. That
these the most difficult of all departments to subject to scientific
treatment should have been the first chosen was due simply to their
preponderating interest: "The proper study of mankind is man". The
systems of what are known as the Natural Sciences are of modern
origin: the first, that of Botany, dates from Cesalpinus in the
sixteenth century. But the principles on which Aristotle proceeded in
dividing and defining, principles which have gradually themselves been
more precisely formulated, are principles applicable to all systematic
arrangements for purposes of orderly study. I give them in the precise
formulae which they have gradually assumed in the tradition of Logic.
The principles of Division are often given in Formal Logic, and the
principles of Classification in Inductive Logic, but there is no
valid reason for the separation. The classification of objects in the
Natural