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Concretions in existence are subsumed, when named, under concretions in discourse. Grammar lays violent hands upon experience, and everything becomes a prey to wit and fancy, a material for fiction and eloquence. Man's intellectual progress has a poetic phase, in which he imagines the world; and then a scientific phase, in which he sifts and tests what he has imagined.
Now, it will be found that this confusion is the origin of most of the difficulties raised by the problem of knowledge, among the ancients as well as among the moderns. The generality of laws and that of genera having been designated by the same word and subsumed under the same idea, the geometrical order and the vital order are accordingly confused together.
But that only means that our generalization has been subsumed under a wider generalization, for which the evidence is still of the same kind, though more extensive. The progress of science is constantly producing such subsumptions, and therefore giving a constantly wider inductive basis for scientific generalizations.
The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say 'the world is One. ABSOLUTE generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed. 'Beings, 'thinkables, 'experiences, would be candidates for this position.
The trend of the selective process runs in much the same direction in both cases. From the point of view which the modern industrial life inculcates, phenomena are habitually subsumed under the quantitative relation of mechanical sequence.
"But isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew what it was...." And so the argument ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the article under certain categories he had come to accept, appreciation was impossible for him. I have many arguments with my classicalist friend. This time it was about George Moore's "Ave."
In translating existence into human terms they give human nature its highest exercise. Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic. If man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thought to be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which all other interests would be subsumed.
It had been proved antecedently that the earth and the other planets tend to the sun; and it had been known from the earliest times that terrestrial bodies tend toward the earth. These were similar phenomena; and to enable them both to be subsumed under one law, it was only necessary to prove that, as the effects were similar in quality so also they, as to quantity, conform to the same rules.
On the contrary, the empirical synthesis and the series of conditions in the phenomenal world subsumed in the minor are necessarily successive and given in time alone.
By this is not meant that the order is one of an Intelligence, but simply that the order which exists in things is conformable to man’s thinking power, that if he knows the course of events he can appreciate their relations, that facts can be subsumed under thoughts. Whatever scheme of order there were, would be nothing to him unless it were conformable to his intellectual functions.
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