the more distinctly, the more closely he holds it to his eyes.
They blinded themselves, too, with the impalpable, titillating Scotch
snuff of _detail_; and thus the boasted facts of the Hog-ites were by no
means always facts--a point of little importance but for the assumption
that they always _were_. The vital taint, however, in Baconianism--its
most lamentable fount of error--lay in its tendency to throw power and
consideration into the hands of merely perceptive men--of those
inter-Tritonic minnows, the microscopical savans--the diggers and pedlers
of minute _facts_, for the most part in physical science--facts all of
which they retailed at the same price upon the highway; their value
depending, it was supposed, simply upon the _fact of their fact_,
without reference to their applicability or inapplicability in the
development of those ultimate and only legitimate facts, called Law.

"Than the persons"--the letter goes on to say--"Than the persons thus
suddenly elevated by the Hog-ian philosophy into a station for which
they were unfitted--thus transferred from the sculleries into the parlors
of Science--from its pantries into its pulpits--than these individuals a
more intolerant--a more intolerable set of bigots and tyrants never
existed on the face of the earth. Their creed, their text and their
sermon were, alike, the one word '_fact_'--but, for the most part, even
of this one word, they knew not even the meaning. On those who ventured
to _disturb_ their facts with the view of putting them in order and to
use, the disciples of Hog had no mercy whatever. All attempts at
generalization were met at once by the words 'theoretical,' 'theory,'
'theorist'--all _thought_, to be brief, was very properly resented as a
personal affront to themselves. Cultivating the natural sciences to the
exclusion of Metaphysics, the Mathematics, and Logic, many of these
Bacon-engendered philosophers--one-idead, one-sided and lame of a
leg--were more wretchedly helpless--more miserably ignorant, in view of
all the comprehensible objects of knowledge, than the veriest unlettered
hind who proves that he knows something at least, in admitting that he
knows absolutely nothing.

"Nor had our forefathers any better right to talk about _certainty_,
when pursuing, in blind confidence, the _a priori_ path of axioms, or of
the Ram. At innumerable points this path was scarcely as straight as a
ram's-horn. The simple truth is, that the Aristotelians