All through the world of matter and of mind, our predecessors, with such wisdom as they had at command, have gone observing, deducing, and classifying; and we inherit in and through language the results of their wisdom […] So with the qualities of objects, both physical and moral, and with their relations, through the whole round of categories: position and succession, form and size, manner and degree: all, in their indefinite multitude, are divided and grouped, like the shades of color, and each group has its own sign, to guide the apprehension and help the discrimination of him who uses it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.21