intellect."[4]*

* Introduction to Metaphysics, page 34.

The usual work of the intellect consists in analysis and
classification: if you have anything presented to you which you do not
understand the obvious question to put yourself is, "what is it?"
Suppose in a dark room which you expected to find empty you stumble
against something, the natural thing to do is to begin at once to try
to fit your experience into some class already familiar to you. You
find it has a certain texture which you class as rather rough, a
temperature which you class as warm, a size which you class as about
two feet high, a peculiar smell which you recognise and you finally
jump to the answer to your question: it is "a dog." This intellectual
operation is a sample of the way in which it comes natural to us to
set to work whenever we find ourselves confronted with any situation
which we are not able to classify off hand, we are not easy till we
can say what the situation is, and saying what consists in hitting
upon some class with which we are already familiar to which it
belongs: in this instance the question was answered when you succeeded
in describing the situation to yourself as "stumbling upon a dog." Now
you were only able to class what was stumbled upon as a dog after you
had recognised a certain number of properties as being those shared by
dogsthe rough texture, the size, the smell. You analysed the situation
as containing these qualities and thereupon classified what had been
stumbled upon as a dog.

Analysis and classification are the two methods which we are
accustomed to rely upon for improving our knowledge in unfamiliar
situations and we are accustomed to take it that they improve our