Taxonomy is the science, laws, or principles of classification, as an ordered arrangement of groups or categories, lying at the heart of human reason. A. P. de Candolle coined taxonomy in French in 1813 to denote the classification of the biological species that Carl Linnaeus had introduced in Systema Naturæ, naming the human race Homo sapiens ‘wise human’ in the tenth edition in 1758.

Today, there are many levels of classification, some of which are illustrated in the diagram on the right from Wikipedia. Together, all species form a generalization hierarchy in the so-called tree of life. To illustrate the insignificance of the Homo genus in biology, here is another diagram from Wikipedia, still evolving, showing how humans relate to the apes, as members of the order Primates in the class Mammalia, of which there are about 6,400 extant species.

However, the classification of the species is not the only example of a taxonomic system. Because classification is essential for bringing order to the world we live in, there are many other species. For instance, Melvil Dewey introduced a decimal library classification system in 1876 as a way of organizing books in libraries, concerned with all the categories of knowledge.

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) consists of three major levels, in a hierarchy of class, division, and section, denoted numerically as hundreds, tens, and units. All the categories of knowledge within the system can be naturally presented as a relation in Integral Relational Logic, such as this table, showing the ten major classes as entities or instances of class Knowledge.

Since Dewey defined these categories, ‘Generalities’ has become ‘Computer science, information and general works’, ‘psychology’ is named as a discipline related to philosophy, and ‘recreation’ has been added to the ‘Arts’.

For myself, I discovered the DCC in the summer of 1980 from my local library, which had arranged its shelves in numerical order. So, as I set out to develop a cosmology of cosmologies that would unify the psychospiritual and physical energies at work in the Universe within a single, all-encompassing framework, I had to walk into the library to find books on philosophy, science, and mathematics. For books on the scientific and philosophical perspectives of space-time were catalogued ‘530.11’ and ‘115.4’ (‘115’ after the seventeenth edition), respectively. So, it is easy to see that the physical universe does not provide the overall context for all knowledge. Space, time, and matter have no special place in Integral Relational Logic, any more than these subjects have in libraries and bookshops.

On the other hand, books of knowledge about knowledge, in the category ‘000 Generalities’, were close to the entrance of the library. Indeed, Dewey originally left Class ‘000’ unallocated, so it could today be considered as the superclass for all classes in Dewey’s system. Indeed, as Integral Relational Logic takes the abstractions of mathematics, computer science, and information modelling methods to the utmost level of generality, books on Panosophy would fit neatly into the superclass 000.

Another way of classifying all knowledge is the Library of Congress Classification (LCC), which uses a two-letter alphabetic system for twenty-one Classes and their Subclasses. Like DCC, Class A is defined as ‘General Works’. Subclass AA is undefined, and so could be used for books on Panosophy if they were ever published. But unlike DCC, books on computer science are under Subclass QA ‘Mathematics’, under Class Q ‘Science’, which also contains QC ‘Physics’.

However, while these classification systems are needed for practical purposes, they are too rigid as a basis for organizing all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines at all times into a coherent whole. The universal principles of concept formation in Integral Relational Logic provide a much more flexible approach, showing that all categories of knowledge, as Līlā ‘play of the Divine’, ultimately merge in indivisible Wholeness.