The Well Ordered Mind

At the beginning of George Eliot's great novel Middlemarch, the heroine's uncle enquires how one of his friends arranges his documents, and is told pigeonholes. Ah, says the uncle, pigeonholes will not do. have tried pigeonholes, but everything gets mixed in pigeonholes: never know whether a paper is in A or Z. I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, Uncle, said Dorothea, I would letter them all and then make a list of subjects under each letter. Many of us who have to deal with a fair number of written documents are only too thankful if we have somebody like Dorothea to bring some system and method into the task, not merely of keeping and preserving the documents, but of finding the one we want on the occasion when we want it. It is a matter of harsh everyday experience that one need not worry very much about losing things in the sense of destroying them accidentally or sending them off to some other person; what you really have to worry about is being able to find them without going to every document on your desk and every file in the cabinet. This difficulty is inherent in the whole idea of storing information for later use. But we ourselves are equally systems which store information for later use, just as the files in our offices or the libraries of our academic institutions are. It seems likely, therefore, that our own nervous systems must encounter problems closely similar to those which appear in files or libraries. Indeed, was interested to note that, in a hearing before a subcommittee of the United States Senate on June 8th last year, a distinguished Senator from North Carolina remarked that he did not confess to his constituents who see his desk that his mind is in the same