the sciences or arts with one another; an
arrangement which maps them out like the rivers of some great country,
and marks the points of their junction, and the direction and force of
their united currents; and this without assigning to any one of them a
superiority above another, but considering them all as necessary members
of the noble unity of human science and effort. There is another kind of
classification which contemplates the order of succession in which they
might most usefully be presented to a single mind, so that the given
mind should obtain the most effective and available knowledge of them
all: and, finally, the most usual classification contemplates the powers
of mind which they each require for their pursuit, the objects to which
they are addressed, or with which they are concerned; and assigns to
each of them a rank superior or inferior, according to the nobility of
the powers they require, or the grandeur of the subjects they
contemplate.

Now, not only would it be necessary to adopt a different classification
with respect to each of these great intentions, but it might be found so
even to vary the order of the succession of sciences in the case of
every several mind to which they were addressed; and that their rank
would also vary with the power and specific character of the mind
engaged upon them. I once heard a very profound mathematician
remonstrate against the impropriety of Wordsworth's receiving a pension
from government, on the ground that he was "only a poet." If the study
of mathematics had always this narrowing effect upon the sympathies, the
science itself would need to be deprived of the rank usually assigned to
it; and there could be no doubt that, in the effect it had on the mind
of this man, and of such others, it was a very contemptible science
indeed. Hence, in estimating the real rank of any art or science, it is
necessary for us to conceive it as it would be grasped by minds of every
order. There are some arts and sciences which we underrate, because no
one has risen to show us with what majesty they may be invested; and
others which we overrate, because we are blinded to their general
meanness by the magnificence which some one man has thrown around them:
thus, philology, evidently the most contemptible of all the sciences,
has been raised to unjust dignity by Johnson.[100] And the subject is
farther complicated by the question of usefulness; for many of the arts
and sciences req