nitesimal degree from the
previous average properties of the species. There is no property of any
species, even the properties that constitute the specific definition,
that is not a matter of more or less.

If, for example, as species be distinguished by a single large red spot
on the back, you will find if you go over a great number of specimens
that red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding there to a more
general redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and brown,
shading into crimson, and so on and so on. And this is true not only of
biological species. It is true of the mineral specimens constituting a
mineral species, and I remember as a constant refrain in the lectures of
Professor Judd upon rock classification, the words, "they pass into one
another by insensible gradations." It is true, I hold, of all things.

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of
identically similar things, but these are things not of experience
but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not
equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense
quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that masks by
the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has
its unique quality, its special individual difference.

This ideal of uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the
classifications of material science; it is true and still more evidently
true of the species of common thought; it is true of common terms. Take
the word "Chair." When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an
average chair. But collect individual instances; think of armchairs and
reading-chairs and dining-room chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that
pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees,
dentist's chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those
miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts
exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this
simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner
I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that
you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much
as mineral and rock specimens, are unique things--if you know them
well enough you will find an individual difference even in a set of
machine-made chairs--and it is only because we do not possess minds
of unlimited capacity, because our