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INTRODUCTION
While the objects and 'spheres' of knowledge have become astoundingly diverse, they still look to be finite, and it would be an act of sheer intellectual impertinence, irresponsibility or flippancy to treat them as separate spoors floating around in some semi-vacuum, or disjecta membra bearing no genuine connection to each other. However formalistic, even arbitrary they can be, and in constant need of revision if not occasional reconceptualization, attempts to classify the sciences at the very least acknowledge the societal nature of learning, that explorers of the universe are all in it together, in something more than a series of isolated exercises to benefit small coteries of like-minded experts, and that scholarly findings may well need sharing across preconceived 'boundaries', with lessened arrogation of some occupations over others. In what follows then, those minds are taken seriously that have sought to put overall meaning or interrelatedness into the world of multiple disciplines, whether through evoking some sense of ultimate purpose, defending a defining principle, or framing a collaborative scheme of things to solve major human problems. A history of the ideas of classifying knowledge reveals that the very complementariness of disciplines has been typically cherished, significant points of overlap admitted and the usefulness of interdisciplinary work acknowledged, whether to broaden scholars' visions or provide necessary collaboration to avert disasters. If securing the environmental future urgently demands interaction between research fields, an historical assessment of attempts to catalogue and synthesize the corpus of human knowledge will be crucial, to reveal what has been done, for what reasons, and whether with any implications for crossdisciplinary work on the environment.
FAMOUS 19TH CENTURY CLASSIFICATIONS OF SCIENCE
Between 1854 and 1869, during which time he was conceiving the grand notion of a Synthetic Philosophy, the English evolutionary philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) published two watershed articles about classifying the sciences. To my knowledge, the first of these pieces was the only essay on the subject ever to be circulated for popular reading (Spencer 1891, pp. 1-117). Alas, the subject now seems dry-as-dust, too complex for public consumption, and the nomenclatures for important areas of specialized research are multiplying so fast that even scholars shy clear today of listing and relating the extraordinary range...