tenderness; the dead being served by the household as if they were actually present in the body. I fancy that if we were able to enter for a moment into the vanished life of some old Greek city, we should find the domestic religion there not less cheerful than the Japanese home-cult remains to-day. I imagine that Greek children, three thousand years ago, must have watched, like the Japanese children of to-day, for a chance to steal some of the good things offered to the ghosts of the ancestors; and I fancy that Greek parents must have chidden quite as gently as Japanese parents chide in this era of Meiji, mingling reproof with instruction, and hinting of weird possibilities." 92. Exposition by classification."By the classification of any series of objects," says Huxley, "is meant the actual, or ideal, arrangement together of those which are like and the separation of those which are unlike; the purpose of this arrangement being to facilitate the operations of the mind in clearly conceiving and retaining in the memory the characters of the objects in question." The process is an important one in the acquisition and communication of knowledge. Things are too multitudinous to be dealt with singly, even for the most capacious intellects. Before they can be of much service to us as objects of knowledge, they must be arranged in groups or classes according to their various degrees of relationship. Classifying things saves us an immense amount of energy; and, as a general rule, the more we classify the more exact and communicable becomes our knowledge. 1 Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Interpretation, pp. 58-60. In its broadest sense, classification may be regarded as including both generalization and division. 93. Generalization. - Generalization may be described as a sort of unifying process. We generalize when we bring like things together and make of them a class by themselves. We generalize, for instance, when, after observing that certain kinds of plants resemble one another very much in certain particulars, we put these kinds together in one group and give that group a name. We generalize, also, when we try to explain the meaning of a number of phenomena by bringing them under the operation of some one law or principle. The process is the exact opposite of that of definition. In its freer and more literary form, generalization may be fairly well illustrated by the following passage from the conclusion of Hamerton's essay "On the Difficulty of Discovering Fixed Laws": The only approximation to a general law that I would venture to affirm is that the strongest reason why men are drawn together is not identity of class, not identity of race, not a common interest in any particular art or science, but because there is something in their idiosyncrasies that gives a charm to intercourse between the two. What it is I cannot tell, and I have never met with the wise man who was able to enlighten me. It is not respect for character, seeing that we often respect people heartily without being able to enjoy their society. It is a mysterious suitableness or adaptability, and how mysterious it is may be in some degree realized when we reflect that we cannot account for our own preferences. I try to explain to myself, for my own intellectual satisfaction, how and why it is that I take pleasure in the society of one very dear friend. He is a most able, honorable, and high-minded man, but others are all that, and they give me no pleasure. My friend and I have really not very much in common, far less than I have with some perfectly indifferent people. I only know that we are always glad to be together, that each of us likes to listen to the other, and that we have talked for innumerable hours. Neither does my affection blind me to his faults. I see them as clearly as if I were his enemy, and doubt not that he sees mine. There is no illusion, and there has been no change in our sentiments for twenty years. As a contrast to this instance I think of others in which everything seems to have been prepared on purpose for facility of intercourse, in which there is similarity of pursuits, of language, of education, of everything that is likely to permit men to talk easily together, and yet there is some obstacle that makes any real intercourse impossible. What the obstacle is I am unable to explain even to myself. It need not be any unkind feeling, nor any feeling of disapprobation; there may be good-will on both sides and a mutual desire for a greater degree of intimacy, yet with all this the intimacy does not come, and such intercourse as we have is that of simple politeness. In these cases each party is apt to think that the other is reserved, when there is no wish to be reserved, but rather a desire to be as open as the unseen obstacle will allow. The existence of the obstacle does not prevent respect and esteem or even a considerable degree of affection. It divides people who seem to be on the most friendly terms; it divides even the nearest relations, brother from brother, and the son from the father. Nobody knows exactly what it is, but we have a word for it, we call it incompatibility. The difficulty of going farther and explaining the real nature of incompatibility is that it takes as many shapes as there are varieties in the characters of mankind. Sympathy and incompatibility, - these are the two great powers that decide for us whether intercourse is to be possible or not, but the causes of them are dark mysteries that lie undiscovered far down in the "abysmal deeps of personality." 1 94. Division. Division, or classification in its narrowest sense, means the breaking up of a genus into its constituent species. From the point of view of rhetoric, however, classification means much more than mere logical division, which is content with simply stating exactly the species or sub-classes which together comprise the genus or class divided. Its object is not so much to give an exact enumeration of these species as to enable the writer to take a comprehensive and systematic survey of them. Its aim is to give grasp, breadth of view, power over the subject treated. Hence it takes into account the purpose the writer had in mind in making the classification, and allows him to adapt it to that purpose. A classification such as that contained in the following passage, for example, has little of the exactness which a strictly logical division would demand; yet for the purpose the writer had in view, it is a highly useful classification: The human element in production, whether in the work of guidance or in obedience, varies as widely as human nature and capacity. Tot homines, tot capacitates. For services to production, laborers may be roughly classified by strata, as in the accompanying diagram: 1 Human Intercourse, chapter i. The unskilled men in A, the slightly skilled in B, the highly skilled artisans in C (such as the locomotive engineers), the highly educated professional men in D (such as civil engineers, electrical experts, and the like), and finally the exceptionally capable managers in E D C B A E. In any one industry some of each kind are required, but not with the same intensity of demand; nor are they wanted in the same relative numbers in different industries. The unskilled man in A has no choice of occupations that he can enter; he can do only the work demanded of his class. And yet, as compared with the demand for them, the number in this strata 1 is enormously large. Moreover, in the A class there is the least capacity to set the future gain above the present indulgence. Thus we find increasing numbers in the very group whose activity is restricted to a given kind of work. Among those least competent to add to production, there is the greatest supply relatively to the demand for them. Their share is small, not only because their industrial efficiency is small, but because the supply of them is excessive. As we go up in the scale of industrial efficiency, we find the numbers in the strata of the more highly skilled diminishing, while the intensity of the demand for them increases. Hence wages increase the higher we go. In the top strata, containing the most efficient managers, we find the highest wages paid throughout the whole industrial field. When a blundering or incompetent manager costs a company millions in losses, a fifty-thousand-dollar man, who adds millions in gains, is a cheap laborer. In this struggle up the scale from Query: Is strata recognized as a singular? |