Bibliography

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Beside [the] idioscopic sciences, there are others which analyze and reason from phenomena that are perfectly familiar to all mankind. Because these are founded on common observation, Bentham gave them the collective designation Cenoscopy, which I adopt as expressive of my own opinion of the basis on which these sciences, which are otherwise called Philosophy, rest.

These three great divisions, Idioscopy, Cenoscopy, and Mathematics, together constitute the aggregate of those sciences which are sometimes called Theoretical Sciences, but which I prefer to call the Heuretic Sciences, or the Sciences of Discovery, because, on the one hand, I am unable to attach any definite meaning to the word “theoretical” that is in truth applicable to these forms of activity and to no others, while, on the other hand, I do find that the more intimate my acquaintance with them becomes, the more emphatically they show themselves as severed from all other human doings by the almost absolute singlemindedness, proportionally to the success of the exertions, with which they are animated by one motive, the desire to learn what is not already known, this learning being the object of desire on its own account only.

The third group of sciences consists of so much of the activity of building up edifices of knowledge as is motivated by a desire of ministering to a human want, whether this desire have or have not an ulterior purpose. The are what we call the practical sciences. Many of them go by the name of arts. By far the greater part of all scientific labor is bestowed upon these sciences.

… pure Mathematics […] is simply the science of the necessary and definite results that would flow from the truth of propositions, as to whose actual truth the group of mathematicians, as such, professes neither responsibility nor interest.

…if I am asked to what the wonderful success of science is due, I shall suggest that to gain the secret of that, it is necessary to consider science as living, and therefore not as knowledge already acquired but as the concrete life of the men who are working to find out the truth.

The second group of sciences, which I call the Systematic Sciences, consists of that activity which is motivated, not so much by a desire to add to human knowledge, as by the desire to render what has already been discovered comprehensible, in a wide sense of the term; that is, to put it into such shape that the mind can grasp and handle it with facility. The systematic scientists sort out the results of the heuretic scientists, subject these results to a criticism more comprehensive than the latter scientists in their narrow specification are in a condition to apply, deduce the best conclusions, which they digest in handbooks, and go on first to the classification of the sciences and to the characterization of the different classes, and finally proceed to such broad surveys as the ‘Philosophie Positive’ of Comte and the ‘Synthetic Philosophy’ of Spencer.