First and Last Things | Page 9

trustworthy science and method for the
investigation and expression of reality.
A mind nourished on anatomical study is of course permeated with the suggestion of the
vagueness and instability of biological species. A biological species is quite obviously a
great number of unique individuals which is separable from other biological species only
by the fact that an enormous number of other linking individuals are inaccessible in
time--are in other words dead and gone--and each new individual in that species does, in
the distinction of its own individuality, break away in however infinitesimal degree from
the previous average properties of the species. There is no property of any species, even
the properties that constitute the specific definition, that is not a matter of more or less.
If, for example, as species be distinguished by a single large red spot on the back, you
will find if you go over a great number of specimens that red spot shrinking here to

nothing, expanding there to a more general redness, weakening to pink, deepening to
russet and brown, shading into crimson, and so on and so on. And this is true not only of
biological species. It is true of the mineral specimens constituting a mineral species, and I
remember as a constant refrain in the lectures of Professor Judd upon rock classification,
the words, "they pass into one another by insensible gradations." It is true, I hold, of all
things.
You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of identically similar things,
but these are things not of experience but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in
chemistry that is not equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the
immense quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that masks by the
operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has its unique quality, its
special individual difference.
This ideal of uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the classifications of
material science; it is true and still more evidently true of the species of common thought;
it is true of common terms. Take the word "Chair." When one says chair, one thinks
vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances; think of armchairs and
reading-chairs and dining-room chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches,
chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentist's chairs, thrones, opera stalls,
seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and
Crafts exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple
straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to
defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me. Chairs just as much as
individual organisms, just as much as mineral and rock specimens, are unique things--if
you know them well enough you will find an individual difference even in a set of
machine-made chairs--and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimited
capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of pigeon-holes for our
correspondence with an unlimited universe of objective uniques, that we have to delude
ourselves into the belief that there is a chairishness in this species common to and
distinctive of all chairs.
Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities,
have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things...
Greek thought impresses me as being over much obsessed by an objective treatment of
certain necessary preliminary conditions of human thought--number and definition and
class and abstract form! But these things,--number, definition, class and abstract form,--I
hold, are merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity--regrettable conditions rather
than essential facts. THE FORCEPS OF OUR MINDS ARE CLUMSY FORCEPS AND
CRUSH THE TRUTH A LITTLE IN TAKING HOLD OF IT...
Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this first attack upon the
philosophical validity of general terms. You have seen the result of those various
methods of black and white reproduction that involve the use of a rectangular net. You
know the sort of process picture I mean--it used to be employed very frequently in
reproducing photographs. At a little distance you really seem to have a faithful

reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closely you find not the unique
form and masses of the original, but a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape and
size. The more earnestly you go into the thing, the closelier you look, the more the
picture is lost in reticulations. I submit, the world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar
relation to the world of fact. For the rough purposes of every day the network picture will
do, but the finer your