ABSTRACT
Classifications of the sciences in our time appear, on the whole, to be a matter of parcelling out different areas which it is assumed are to be investigated in the same way. The laws of natural philosophy claim to be both universal and exhaustive—anything that happens in the universe is supposed to be in principle explicable in terms of them. All the basic phenomena of weather—heat conduction and convection, evaporation and condensation of water, absorption of radiation, electrostatic charge and discharge, winds, and so on.—are strictly controlled by known physical laws. Biology, which now threatens to swallow up and replace botany and zoology in our society, had its effective birth as an anti-religious polemical weapon in the nineteenth century. In natural history on the other hand the structure of the subjects is radically different—in none of them is there anything really analogous to 'fundamental theory' in physics, any more than there is in sociology.
