"Science is the systematic classification of experience"
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Science, in Lewes's formulation, isn’t a cathedral of eternal truths; it’s a filing system built out of lived mess. Calling it "systematic classification" trims the romance from the scientific enterprise and replaces it with something more bracing: method as discipline, knowledge as bookkeeping. That austerity is the point. Lewes, writing in the 19th century’s churn of Darwin, industrialization, and swelling confidence in empiricism, is pushing back against the notion that science delivers reality pre-packaged. It organizes experience so experience can be compared, tested, and argued over without collapsing into anecdote.
The subtext is quietly anti-mystical and anti-metaphysical. If science is classification, then it is always tethered to what we can observe and measure; it doesn’t get to float off into pure speculation. At the same time, Lewes is also puncturing scientific swagger. Classifications are human artifacts: provisional, revisable, shaped by the categories we choose and the instruments we have. Today we’d say: models, not mirrors. He anticipates a modern humility that sits awkwardly beside popular "trust the science" absolutism.
The intent, then, is twofold. He defends science against charges of being cold reductionism by recasting it as the disciplined ordering of experience, not the denial of it. He also warns scientists and their cheerleaders that authority comes from procedure, not priesthood. Science works because it makes experience legible and shareable, turning private impressions into public knowledge - always with the fine print that the index can be rewritten.
The subtext is quietly anti-mystical and anti-metaphysical. If science is classification, then it is always tethered to what we can observe and measure; it doesn’t get to float off into pure speculation. At the same time, Lewes is also puncturing scientific swagger. Classifications are human artifacts: provisional, revisable, shaped by the categories we choose and the instruments we have. Today we’d say: models, not mirrors. He anticipates a modern humility that sits awkwardly beside popular "trust the science" absolutism.
The intent, then, is twofold. He defends science against charges of being cold reductionism by recasting it as the disciplined ordering of experience, not the denial of it. He also warns scientists and their cheerleaders that authority comes from procedure, not priesthood. Science works because it makes experience legible and shareable, turning private impressions into public knowledge - always with the fine print that the index can be rewritten.
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| Topic | Science |
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