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two parallel wings. Each has its nomological, its taxonomic, and its descriptive divisions. The nomological sciences are pure physics on the physical side, general psychology, general sociology, general economics on the psychical side. These sciences all tend to pass into metaphysics on which they depend The taxonomic or classificatory sciences are chemistry, crystallography, mineralogy and biology on the physical side, linguistics ethnology, and special psychology on the psychical side. The descriptive sciences The classificatory sciences tend to become nomological. Chemistry & physiology tend to become pass into general physics, parts of linguistics to become general psychology etc. The descriptive sciences so called,
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endeavor not only to describe but also to account for the characters of individual objects. They are astronomy and geognosy on the physical side, history, archeology etc on the psychical side.
We now come to what particularly concerns us, Cenoscopy, or Philosophy. You will observe that I make this a branch of science upon which all special science including psychology depends, while the empirical philosophers generally, Comte, followed by his imitators (for (and all their violent opposition to him only marks their dependence more strongly) Spencer and Fiske, as well as Wundt and many others make philosophy to depend upon the special sciences. I do not however so totally
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disagree with them as would appear at first glance. On the contrary, I quite acknowledge that there is such a science as they call positive philosophy or Synthetic Philosophy or Cosmic Philosophy by some other such name. That science stands in my opinion at the head of the Sciences of Review. But all these philosophers make a the one of the most disastrous mistakes possible in confounding this science with Cenoscopy, which must not depend upon the special sciences inasmuch as they, on the contrary, need to depend upon it.
The reason that I hold this confusion unification to be so dis of widely separated sciences to be so disastrous is that it leads to the most important
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questions, especially logical questions, never receiving any serious consideration at any time. One branch of cenoscopy is logic, and one branch of logic is methodeutic which should investigate the general principles upon which scientific studies should be carried on. But under the plan of these philosophers, logic is to be founded upon the study of all the other sciences. That is to say you are first to make your researches and after that inquire how they ought to be made, locking the barn door after the horse is already stolen. To be sure, those philosophers maintain that no sciences can be reciprocally dependent upon one each
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other. But the question of whether they can be so dependent or not, than which no question is more of greater importance to the well-being of science, never receives at their hands any serious study. The question is asked in the vaguest terms, without any exact determination of what kind of dependence is referred to; and is answered on the basis of a loose analogy to cases in which when the number of observations exceeds the number required to draw a conclusion the conclusion is utilized to correct the observations. They do not reme analyze the conditions under which such a thing is possible. For the reason that under their method they first assume an answer to it without any serious