Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ;hapter n. PHYSICAL FORCES AS RELATED TO VITAL FORCES. Two dangers accompany classification, or an effort to understand by resemblances the facts of the world in their relation to each other. The first is that of overlooking the gradations by which the points of extreme contrast are united, and so of regarding differences as more fundamental than they really are. This is the early error of immature knowledge. The second danger is the reverse of this. When we discover the lines of demarcation to be vanishing ones, and that leading characteristics very slowly disappear as we approach and pass their boundaries, while other characteristics arise in the same gradual way as we leave these behind us, we jump to the opposite conclusion, and regard our distinctions of classes as relatively immaterial. The ultimate value of a difference depends on its real nature, and is not much modified by the steps by which it has been reached. The difference remains a fixed fact, a determinate feature in the final results, not reduced in its importance by intermediate gradations. These gradations instruct 36 ERRORS IN METHOD OF INQUIRY. 3/ us in the order of development, and help to define the value of differences, but do not remove or essentially reduce the diversity which exists in the results'.themselves, or destroy its worth as knowledge. Our knowledge is made rather the more complete. Under a doctrine of development our spaces in classification gain a double measurement, that of sensible and constructive qualities, and that of the length of the periods during which these diversities have grown up. These two will in large measure coincide, and 'serve to explain each other. For illustration, the apparent difference between physical forces and mental activities is the greatest possible,... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.