Wells's chairs: useful classifications without absolute kinds
All chairs are quite different
The identifiable source is Wells's appendix, ‘Scepticism of the Instrument,’ in A Modern Utopia (1905), inspected here in Project Gutenberg's electronic transcription, updated 2020. Its heading identifies a revised version of a paper read in 1903 and printed in Mind, XIII, no. 51. Chesterton's short sentence is not the wording of the chair passage in this witness. Wells ranges from armchairs to benches and thrones, challenging a perfectly bounded definition; even manufactured examples, he says, differ individually. Wells, appendix, paragraphs beginning ‘This idea of uniqueness’ through ‘Chairs just as much’.
Wells nevertheless calls classification ‘a necessary condition’ of thought and allows its practical usefulness. His target is its absolute validity: everyday reasoning can be checked and corrected, whereas metaphysical deductions lack that safeguard. Appendix, ‘I have it in my mind’ and ‘Every species waggles’.
The distinction matters to Chesterton's charge of self-contradiction. Calling objects chairs while denying that they share anything would indeed undermine the statement's own terms. But individual difference does not entail absence of resemblance, and useful grouping need not claim a perfect boundary. Chesterton's objection therefore reaches the stronger thesis he formulates—‘no categories at all’—more directly than Wells's qualified position. The remaining dispute is whether classifications can support genuine knowledge while falling short of exact correspondence, rather than whether people can speak or think at all.
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