MS 1343 (1902) - Of the Classification of the Sciences

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The movable furniture is the study of the Cabinet-Maker, the Upholsterer, the Mattress Maker, the Carpet Weaver. The adornment of the ground of the house will demand a study of Gardening. This does not include Horticulture or any other botanical art, whose affiliations we shall find in due course. The house having been built and furnished, the problem will be how to live in it. This calls in the first place for the two extensive sciences of Househeating and Illumination to which in the near future, will be added that of House-refrigeration. But these sciences have nearer affinities than with the House-instinct. In the next place, life in a house demands the ancient science of Housekeeping with its numerous branches.

We come now to the Publicultural Sciences; and first to those which minister to the Morals-instinct. It can hardly be necessary to insist that Ethics is not such a science. The study of ethics may have the effect of making men more moral. That is a point upon which good writers on the subject have entertained contrary opinions. Some treatises on the subject have been

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animated by this ulterior and illegitimate design; and it has injured them as inquiries into ethics. Without aiming at any great exactitude, we may say roughly that the purpose of ethics is to ascertain what right and wrong are, perhaps to find out what is right and what wrong. But to do that is not necessarily to find out how to make men better. That is a subject to which many men have devoted their lives, but it has hardly been erected into a science. The reason is that those who have had the matter at heart have had a firm belief that they knew already how to bring about the result, and therefore had no need of a genuine inquiry into the theory of the art. With Polity it is very different. The question of how best to organize a government for man in general or for this or that particular people, and what the laws ought to be, or Jurisprudence, has received its full share of attentions. Even the question of what the Law of a given country actually is, although it does not essentially

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involve any practical question, has always been treated from the point of view of the lawyer, who has a client to advise, or of the judge who has to issue a decree. For that reason the science of the Law, although it merely inquires what as a matter of fact will be the decision of the courts, has nevertheless to be placed in this group among the practical sciences. For a similar reason, treatises on Etiquette and Ceremony belong here. Of course, both Jurisprudence and Law embrace each many sciences to which groups of individuals devote their lives. Law, for example, embraces International Law (standing apart from the rest), Ecclesiastical Law, Admiralty Law, the Law of Corporations, of Railways, of Bankruptcy, of Torts, etc. such branches as Pleadings, the Law of Evidence, etc., and such branches as Digests, Conveyances[??], Counterfeit Detecting, Forgery Detecting, general Detection, etc. Under Jurisprudence we have discussions of Prison Discipline, etc. Under the general group belongs much of the 'Sociology,' so called, such as the question of Financing Great Cities, of the Cooperative System, etc.

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Everything that is written in the interest of the Magic-instinct is so passionate, or at any rate, full of satisfied faith, that it may be doubted whether there is any science directly ministrant to this instinct.

The War-instinct, on the other hand, is decidedly the least served with truly scientific, yet earnestly practical, investigations of any of the instincts, a fact explicable by its being at once a publicultural instinct and the most intensely energetic of all instincts. The subdivisions of the Science of War are so well understood that it is not worth while to enumerate them here.

The Pet-instinct divides according as its object is children, other human favorites, or animal pets. All the same[??] practical questions concerning children have been studied with great earnestness. Part of this science belongs more naturally under medicine, whose general principles it follows. The rest relates to education and is thus related both to the

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Preach-instinct and to the Peek-instinct. But it is the Pet-instinct that is its real motive, and there are no such close congeners in the other groups as to require its separation from this one.