[1] πραγμάτεια [= pragmateia Tr.]. See Prantl, i. 545.
Therefore the relation between content or matter of knowledge, and the form which is its general characteristic as knowledge, is of this kind. We can either study the objects of knowledge directly as we perceive them, or indirectly, as examples of the way in which we know. As studied for their own sake, they are regarded as the matter or content in which the general form of knowledge finds individual realisation. In botany, for instance, we have a large number of actual plants classified and explained in their relation to one another. A botanist is interested directly in the affinities and evolution of these plants, and in the principles of biology which underlie their history. He pushes his researches further and further into the individual matters that come to light, without, as a rule, more than a passing reflection upon the abstract nature of the methods which he is creating as his work proceeds. He classifies, explains, observes, experiments, theorises, generalises, to the best of his power, solely in order to grasp and render intelligible the region of concrete fact that lies before him. Now while his particular results and discoveries { 48} constitute the “form” or knowable properties of the plant-world _as the object of botanical science_, the science which inquires into the general nature of knowledge must treat these particular results as “mere matter”--as something with which it is not directly concerned, any more than the art which makes a statue is primarily and directly concerned with the chemical and mechanical properties of marble. The “form” or knowable properties with which the general science of knowledge is directly concerned, consists in those methods and processes which the man of science, developing the modes in which common sense naturally works, constructs unconsciously as he goes along. Thus, not the nature and affinities of the plant-world, but classification, explanation, observation, experiment, theory, are the phenomena in virtue of which the organised structure of botanical science participates in the form of knowledge, and its objects become, in these respects, objects of logical theory.