Hello davidlewis2-ga,
I have found a quote that, either in or out of context, seems to
address this topic. It is by a distinguished philosopher, not a
distinguished scientist, but I think that it will meet your needs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an 1837 address entitled "The American
Scholar", opined:
"But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are
not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law
of the human mind?"
"The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. Number: 21047"
Bartleby.com
http://www.bartleby.com/66/47/21047.html
The context for this quote is as follows:
"To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and
by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then
three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own
unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing
anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and
remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently
learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant
accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but
the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not
foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The
astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human
mind, is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most
remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory
fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new
powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate
the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight."
"The American Scholar" (Hypertext Version By: Carolyn Barra)
American Literature I: From the Beginnings to the Civil War
Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell, Department of English (Fall 2002)
New York University
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/amlit/hyper/cvbtext.htm
As an alternative, here is quote from a social scientist (though one
with a philosophical bent), Emile Durkheim, from his 1912 work "The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life":
"There are, at the root of our judgments, a certain number of
essential notions that dominate our entire intellectual life; they are
those that philosophers, since Aristotle, have called the categories
of the understanding: notions of time, space, genus, number, cause,
substance, personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal
properties of things. They are like the solid framework that encloses
thought; it seems we cannot think of objects that are not in time or
space, which are not numerable, etc. Other notions are contingent and
changeable; we conceive that they may be lacking to a person, a
society, an epoch; the former appear to be nearly inseparable from the
normal functioning of the mind."
Google cache of "Chapter I: Durkheim and the Social Character of the
Categories"
Home Page for: Warren Schmaus, Professor of Philosophy, Lewis
Department of Humanities, Illinois Institute of Technology
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:hu38MK3PZCUC:www.iit.edu/~schmaus/Durkheim/1/chapter1.htm
I think that you could take an excerpt from either of these passages,
though my sense is that the Emerson passage is less restricted and
therefore more useful to you.
I hope that this information is helpful.
- justaskscott-ga
Search term used on Bartleby.com:
classification
categorize
Search terms used on Google:
"but what is classification"
"without words to objectify and categorize"
durkheim "elementary forms"
[The second search on each of the search engines relates to a
quotation by biologist Ruth Hubbard that seemed close, but not quite
right, to what you wanted.]
[I tried other searches as well, but these were the ones that resulted
in the pages I have cited.] |
,
0 Comments
)