Classification of the Sciences (M)

A. MS., n.p., later than the Minute Logic, but before 1908.

Page 1
Thus far we have left untouched that which is at this moment the problem of problems for us, for the sake of which has been said all that has been said concerning the classification of the sciences, namely the subdivisions of Philosophy, or Cenoscopy, and in particular of the place of logic among them...
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The inquiry is threefold: What are the kinds of phenomena to be observed in the physicopsychical universe, and what are their essential relations, that is, what are those relations which should appear in the very descriptions of the phenomena? What are their dynamical relations and the course of their evolution? And what are their rational relations and the need of their getting somehow to be such as they are? ...

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the science of metaphysics must depend for its successful prosecution upon the recognition that a part if not all the conceptions which this science attaches to real objcts are merely logical concepts put to different applications than that which logic makes of them; in consequence of which metaphysics depends to a very great degree upon the science of logic...

Pages 12 and 13

But preliminary to normative science, which is essentially classificatory, — stop to take that well in, I beg you, gentle reader, there should be a nomological science, which shall make out all the different indecomposable elements which enter into everything that is conceivably possible, discriminates them with care, and shows how they can be varied and combined. This science I hesitate to call phenomenology after Hegal, for fear of marring his peculiar conception of it; and therefore, though I think it is essentially the same thing under a somewhat different aspect, I will name phaneroscopy.

It is the science of the different elementary constituents of all ideas. Its material [m13] is, of course, universal experience, — experience I mean of the fanciful and the abstract, as well as of the concrete and real. Yet to suppose that in such experience the elements were to be found already separate would be to suppose the unimaginable and selfcontradictory. They must be separated by a process of thought that cannot be summoned up Hegel-wise on demand. They must be picked out of the fragments that necessary reasonings scatter; and therefore it is that phaneroscopic research requires a previous study of mathematics.