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Classification schemes were part and parcel of Ampère’s scientific practice. The various classifications he provided – of chemical elements, of the faculties of the human mind, of the various sciences themselves – testify to his eclecticism. Now, such an interest in classification points towards the fact that the latter was considered a paradigmatic formulation of the experimental method. In early nineteenth-century France, this was a legacy of the philosophy of Francis Bacon. But that legacy also confronted science with an ontological challenge: classification would merely be the arbitrary and subjective creation of nominal kinds. In his scientific practice, Ampère invokes another legacy, that of the Naturalists. By so doing, he claims that the relations expressed in a classification scheme may correspond to those that do exist in reality.