Page:System of Logic.djvu/505

 such a classification, when systematically adhered to, upon our habits of thought, must be regarded as mischievous.

The ends of scientific classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed. The properties, therefore, according to which objects are classified, should, if possible, be those which are causes of many other properties; or, at any rate, which are sure marks of them. Causes are preferable, both as being the surest and most direct of marks, and as being themselves the properties on which it is of most use that our attention should be strongly fixed. But the property which is the cause of the chief peculiarities of a class, is unfortunately seldom fitted to serve also as the diagnostic of the class. Instead of the cause, we must generally select some of its more prominent effects, which may serve as marks of the other effects and of the cause.

A classification thus formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a Technical or Artificial, classification or arrangement. The phrase Natural Classification seems most peculiarly appropriate to such arrangements as correspond, in the groups which they form, to the spontaneous tendencies of the mind, by placing together the objects most similar in their general aspect; in opposition to those technical systems which, arranging things according to their agreement in some circumstance arbitrarily selected, often throw into the same group objects which in the general aggregate of their properties present no resemblance, and into different and remote groups, others which have the closest similarity. It is one of the most valid recommendations of any classification to the character of a scientific one, that it shall be a natural classification in this sense also; for the test of its scientific character is the number and importance of the properties which can be asserted in common of all objects included in a group; and properties on which the general aspect of the things depends are, if only on that ground, important, as well as, in most cases, numerous. But, though a strong recommendation, this circumstance is not a sine qua non; since the most obvious properties of things may be of trifling importance compared with others that are not obvious. I have seen it mentioned as a great absurdity in the Linnæan classification, that it places (which by-the-way it does not) the violet by the side of the oak; it certainly dissevers natural affinities, and brings together things quite as unlike as the oak and the violet are. But the difference, apparently so wide, which renders the juxtaposition of those two vegetables so suitable an illustration of a bad arrangement, depends, to the common eye, mainly on mere size and texture; now if we made it our study to adopt the classification which would involve the least peril of similar rapprochements, we should return to the obsolete division into trees, shrubs, and herbs, which though of primary importance with regard to mere general aspect, yet (compared even with so petty and unobvious a distinction as that into dicotyledons and monocotyledons) answers to so few differences in the other properties of plants, that a classification founded on it (independently of the indistinctness of the lines of demarcation) would be as completely artificial and technical as the Linnæan.

Our natural groups, therefore, must often be founded not on the obvious but on the unobvious properties of things, when these are of greater importance. But in such cases it is essential that there