Excerpt from Classification: Theoretical and Practical, Together With an Appendix Containing as Essay Towards a Bibliographical History of System of Classification
These lectures have been now for several years out of print. In the meantime there has been a small but persistent demand, and lately there have been several requests for a reprint. The author has hesitated to re-issue without re-editing, but it has proved impossible to find time for this, and the matter is reprinted unchanged, except for the somewhat considerable additions. No attempt has been made through this additional matter to bring up to date with the exhaustiveness attempted in the original edition, but most of the more representative and striking systems, both theoretical and practical, have been added and a certain amount of bibliographical reference has been given for the orientation of the reader who wishes to be more exhaustive.
If there were time for re-editing, the author might alter his former language a little in deference to the feelings of logicians and metaphysicians, and he would have again to revise the use of the words "corpuscles", "ions", and "electrons", but in essence there is little that he. would care to change. It is true that psychologists have tended of late years still more to the notion that classification is one of subjects rather than of objects, but the author is still more of the conviction that this is a profound theoretical and practical mistake, leading to endless confusion. He sees no reason to modify the main propositions; (1) That the order of classification is the order of objects, (2) That this order forms a series of growing complexity from the simplest to the most complex, (3) That this order is at the same time the logical, chronological and generally, the genealogical order, (4) That this order concerns the subhuman, the human, and the superhuman, (5) That the human has to do with, (a) ideas of natural objects (images of things that are or have been, including human and superhuman objects) and (b) ideas of artificial objects (images of objects produced or modified by the human mind or which represent objects having no counterpart in the outer world except as figures of what might be), (6) That practical classification is the putting together of books most used together, (7) That in case of conflict in book classification the practical always prevails over the theoretical.
A word may be added as to theology, which was, perhaps, touched too lightly for clearness in the first edition - in the effort to spare prejudices.
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