test possible obstacles to a merely mechanical use of
language: we should carefully keep alive a consciousness of its meaning,
by referring, by aid of derivation and the analogies between the ideas
of the roots and the derivatives, to the origin of words; and as words,
however philosophically constructed, are always tending, like coins, to
have their inscription worn off, we should be ever stamping them afresh.
This we shall effect, if we contemplate habitually, not the _formulas_
which record the laws of the phenomena (for, if so, the formulas will
themselves progressively lose their meaning), but the phenomena whence
the laws were collected; and we must conceive these phenomena in the
concrete, and clothe them in circumstances.

CHAPTER VII.

CLASSIFICATION, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION.

Every name which connotes an attribute thereby divides, but only
incidentally, all things, known and unknown, real and imagined, into two
classes, viz. those which have, and those which have not the attribute.
But sometimes the naming itself is but the secondary and subsidiary, and
the classification, the primary object. The general problem of such
classification is, to provide that things shall be thought of in such
groups, and the groups in such an order, as will best promote the
remembrance and ascertainment of their laws. Its subjects are _real
things_ exclusively, but _all_ real things, since, to place one object
in a group, we ought to know the divisions of nature at large.

Any property may be the basis for a classification; but those best
suited are properties which are causes, or, next, as the cause of a
class's chief peculiarities seldom serves as its diagnostic, any effect
which is a sure mark both of the cause and of the other effects. Only a
classification so grounded is scientific; the same also is not technical
or artificial, but natural, and emphatically _natural_ (as compared with
classifications in an inferior degree also _natural_, which are based on
properties important with reference to the reasoner's special practical
objects), when the classification is based on those properties which
would most impress one who knew all the properties, but was not
interested particularly in any one. Further, it is a great
recommendation of a classification, that it groups together things of
like general aspect; but this is not a _sine qua non_: a group may be
_natural_ even if based on very _unobvious_ properties, prov