With this clause, Burke accounts for our human impulses to classify, to organize, and to privilege. He writes: "Here man's skill with symbols combines with his negativity and with the tendencies towards modes of livelihood implicit in the inventions that make for division of labor, the result being definitions and differentiations and allocations of property protected by the negativities of the law" (15). Burke sees this impulse towards hierarchy as the basis of our social system and class structure. In choosing one set of terms, and not another, we privilege certain modes of thought, certain ways of living, certain values. Our social structure is "differentiated, with privileges to some that are denied to others" (15).

In this description, we can begin to see how the various clauses in Burke's definition work together. One clause implies, reinforces, and requires another. Symbolicity, negativity, and technology all inform the creation and functioning of various human hierarchies: division of labor, property structures, systems of law, government, and so on. In turn, the principle of hierarchy (the impulse to find order) structures human symbol systems, allowing for schemes of classification, definition, and differentiation. These schemata function according to the principle of the negative, according to the human capacity for distinguishing one thing from another, and a thing from what it is not (a word).

Much like the various elements of Burke's pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose), the clauses of his definition are dynamically poised in tension with one another, in dialogic and dialectical relationship. Burke's comments in the "Introduction" of A Grammar of Motives seem equally applicable to his definition: "Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltennesss, where all is merged. They have been thrown out from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction. So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is consubstantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead" (xix). Just as the various terms of the pentad are implicated within one another, the clauses of the definition merge and combine in this molten mass from which distictions arise.

Burke's final clause is: And rotten with perfection.

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