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Full Idea
By knowing one lump of clay, all things made of clay are known; by knowing a nugget of gold, all things made of gold are known.
Gist of Idea
By knowing one piece of clay or gold, you know all of clay or gold
Source
Anon (Upan) (The Upanishads [c.950 BCE], 'Chandogya')
Book Ref
'The Upanishads', ed/tr. Prabhavananda /Manchester [Mentor 1957], p.68
A Reaction
I can't think of a better basic definition of a natural kind. There is an inductive assumption, of course, which hits trouble when you meet fool's gold, or two different sorts of jade. But the concept of a natural kind is no more than this.
Related Idea
Idea 6939 What is true of one piece of copper is true of another (unlike brass) [Peirce]
| 8153 | By knowing one piece of clay or gold, you know all of clay or gold [Anon (Upan)] |
| 12265 | All water is the same, because of a certain similarity [Aristotle] |
| 19761 | Men started with too few particular names, but later had too few natural kind names [Rousseau] |
| 6939 | What is true of one piece of copper is true of another (unlike brass) [Peirce] |
| 12681 | There are natural kinds of processes [Ellis] |
| 15798 | Kinds are arrangements of dispositions [Fetzer] |
| 6170 | Natural kinds are defined by their real essence, as in gold having atomic number 79 [Rowlands] |
| 6773 | If F is a universal appearing in a natural law, then Fs form a natural kind [Bird] |
| 17478 | Maybe two kinds are the same if there is no change of entropy on isothermal mixing [Hendry] |