Now, my dear friend, I do assure you, most positively, that I
      represent this matter fairly, on the soundest authority; and you
      can easily understand how a notion so absurd on its very face
      must have operated to retard the progress of all true
      knowledge—which makes its advances almost invariably by intuitive
      bounds. The ancient idea confined investigations to crawling; and
      for hundreds of years so great was the infatuation about Hog
      especially, that a virtual end was put to all thinking, properly
      so called. No man dared utter a truth to which he felt himself
      indebted to his Soul alone. It mattered not whether the truth was
      even demonstrably a truth, for the bullet-headed savans of the
      time regarded only the road by which he had attained it. They
      would not even look at the end. “Let us see the means,” they
      cried, “the means!” If, upon investigation of the means, it was
      found to come under neither the category Aries (that is to say
      Ram) nor under the category Hog, why then the savans went no
      farther, but pronounced the “theorist” a fool, and would have
      nothing to do with him or his truth. Now, it cannot be maintained, even, that by the crawling system
      the greatest amount of truth would be attained in any long series
      of ages, for the repression of imagination was an evil not to be
      compensated for by any superior certainty in the ancient modes of
      investigation. The error of these Jurmains, these Vrinch, these
      Inglitch, and these Amriccans (the latter, by the way, were our
      own immediate progenitors), was an error quite analogous with
      that of the wiseacre who fancies that he must necessarily see an
      object the better the more closely he holds it to his eyes. These
      people blinded themselves by details. When they proceeded
      Hoggishly, their “facts” were by no means always facts—a matter
      of little consequence had it not been for assuming that they were
      facts and must be facts because they appeared to be such. When
      they proceeded on the path of the Ram, their course was scarcely
      as straight as a ram’s horn, for they never had an axiom which
      was an axiom at all. They must have been very blind not to see
      this, even in their own day; for even in their own day many of
      the long “established” axioms had been rejected. For example—“Ex
      nihilo nihil fit”; “a body cannot act where it is not”; “there
      cannot exist antipodes”; “darkness cannot come out of light”—all
      these, and a dozen other similar propositions, formerly admitted
      without hesitation as axioms, were, even at the period of which I
      speak, seen to be untenable. How absurd in these people, then, to
      persist in putting faith in “axioms” as immutable bases of Truth! But even out of the mouths of their soundest reasoners it is easy
      to demonstrate the futility, the impalpability of their axioms in
      general. Who was the soundest of their logicians? Let me see! I
      will go and ask Pundit and be back in a minute.... Ah, here we
      have it! Here is a book written nearly a thousand years ago and
      lately translated from the Inglitch—which, by the way, appears to
      have been the rudiment of the Amriccan. Pundit says it is
      decidedly the cleverest ancient work on its topic, Logic. The
      author (who was much thought of in his day) was one Miller, or
      Mill; and we find it recorded of him, as a point of some
      importance, that he had a mill-horse called Bentham. But let us
      glance at the treatise! Ah!—“Ability or inability to conceive,” says Mr. Mill, very
      properly, “is in no case to be received as a criterion of
      axiomatic truth.” What modern in his senses would ever think of
      disputing this truism? The only wonder with us must be, how it
      happened that Mr. Mill conceived it necessary even to hint at any
      thing so obvious. So far good—but let us turn over another paper. What have we here?—“Contradictories cannot both be true—that is,
      cannot co-exist in nature.” Here Mr. Mill means, for example,
      that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree—that it cannot be
      at the same time a tree and not a tree. Very well; but I ask him
      why. His reply is this—and never pretends to be any thing else
      than this—“Because it is impossible to conceive that
      contradictories can both be true.” But this is no answer at all,
      by his own showing, for has he not just admitted as a truism that
      “ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be received as
      a criterion of axiomatic truth.”

      Now I do not complain of these ancients so much because their
      logic is, by their own showing, utterly baseless, worthless and
      fantastic altogether, as because of their pompous and imbecile
      proscription of all other roads of Truth, of all other means for
      its attainment than the two preposterous paths—the one of
      creeping and the one of crawling—to which they have dared to
      confine the Soul that loves nothing so well as to soar. By the by, my dear friend, do you not think it would have puzzled
      these ancient dogmaticians to have determined by which of their
      two roads it was that the most important and most sublime of all
      their truths was, in effect, attained? I mean the truth of
      Gravitation. Newton owed it to Kepler. Kepler admitted that his
      three laws were guessed at—these three laws of all laws which led
      the great Inglitch mathematician to his principle, the basis of
      all physical principle—to go behind which we must enter the
      Kingdom of Metaphysics: Kepler guessed—that is to say imagined. He was essentially a “theorist”—that word now of so much
      sanctity, formerly an epithet of contempt. Would it not have
      puzzled these old moles too, to have explained by which of the
      two “roads” a cryptographist unriddles a cryptograph of more than
      usual secrecy, or by which of the two roads Champollion directed
      mankind to those enduring and almost innumerable truths which
      resulted from his deciphering the Hieroglyphics. One word more on this topic and I will be done boring you. Is it
      not passing strange that, with their eternal prattling about
      roads to Truth, these bigoted people missed what we now so
      clearly perceive to be the great highway—that of Consistency? Does it not seem singular how they should have failed to deduce
      from the works of God the vital fact that a perfect consistency
      must be an absolute truth! How plain has been our progress since
      the late announcement of this proposition! Investigation has been
      taken out of the hands of the ground-moles and given, as a task,
      to the true and only true thinkers, the men of ardent
      imagination. These latter theorize.