ABSTRACT
Science, like all human knowledge, begins with sense-experience. But sense-experience is so diverse and so complicated as to appear almost chaotic. In a real chaos life, or at least a rational life, would be impossible. So from earliest times the human mind sought out the elements of order in the world, and the first step in this direction consisted in the noting of similarities between things. The vast number of classifications spontaneously made by early man is obvious from the evidence of language. Every name expresses the recognition of a class of objects; and language is much older than science. Many of these early classifications were based on inadequate observation. Classification is intimately connected with description. When objects are recognized as forming a class, the class has to be named and described. The name and the description help to make permanent the result of the process of classifying.
