:--the savans
contenting themselves with proscribing all _other_ competitors, past,
present, and to come; putting an end to all controversy on the topic by
the promulgation of a Median law, to the effect that the Aristotelian
and Baconian roads are, and of right ought to be, the solo possible
avenues to knowledge:--'Baconian,' you must know, my dear friend," adds
the letter-writer at this point, "was an adjective invented as
equivalent to Hog-ian, and at the same time more dignified and
euphonious.

"Now I do assure you most positively"--proceeds the epistle--"that I
represent these matters fairly; and you can easily understand how
restrictions so absurd on their very face must have operated, in those
days, to retard the progress of true Science, which makes its most
important advances--as all History will show--by seemingly intuitive
_leaps_. These ancient ideas confined investigation to crawling; and I
need not suggest to you that crawling, among varieties of locomotion, is
a very capital thing of its kind;--but because the tortoise is sure of
foot, for this reason must we clip the wings of the eagles? For many
centuries, so great was the infatuation, about Hog especially, that a
virtual stop was put to all thinking, properly so called. No man dared
utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone. It
mattered not whether the truth was even demonstrably such; for the
dogmatizing philosophers of that epoch regarded only _the road_ by which
it professed to have been attained. The end, with them, was a point of
no moment, whatever:--'the means!' they vociferated--'let us look at the
means!'--and if, on scrutiny of the means, it was found to come neither
under the category Hog, nor under the category Aries (which means ram),
why then the savans went no farther, but, calling the thinker a fool
and branding him a 'theorist,' would never, thenceforward, have any
thing to do either with _him_ or with his truths.

"Now, my dear friend," continues the letter-writer, "it cannot be
maintained that by the crawling system, exclusively adopted, men would
arrive at the maximum amount of truth, even in any long series of ages;
for the repression of imagination was an evil not to be counterbalanced
even by _absolute_ certainty in the snail processes. But their certainty
was very far from absolute. The error of our progenitors was quite
analogous with that of the wiseacre who fancies he must necessarily see
an object