ed that an exception from the general rule is
to be made, in cases where the 'impossibility to conceive' is so
peculiarly great as when we are called upon to conceive a tree _both_ a
tree and _not_ a tree. Let no attempt, I say, be made at urging this
sotticism; for, in the first place, there are no _degrees_ of
'impossibility,' and thus no one impossible conception can be _more_
peculiarly impossible than another impossible conception:--in the second
place, Mr. Mill himself, no doubt after thorough deliberation, has most
distinctly, and most rationally, excluded all opportunity for exception,
by the emphasis of his proposition, that, _in no case_, is ability or
inability to conceive, to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic
truth:--in the third place, even were exceptions admissible at all, it
remains to be shown how any exception is admissible _here_. That a tree
can be both a tree and not a tree, is an idea which the angels, or the
devils, _may_ entertain, and which no doubt many an earthly Bedlamite,
or Transcendentalist, _does_.

"Now I do not quarrel with these ancients," continues the letter-writer,
"_so much_ on account of the transparent frivolity of their logic--which,
to be plain, was baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether--as on
account of their pompous and infatuate proscription of all _other_ roads
to Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths--the one of creeping and
the other of crawling--to which, in their ignorant perversity, they have
dared to confine the Soul--the Soul which loves nothing so well as to
soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly
incognizant of '_path_.'

"By the bye, my dear friend, is it not an evidence of the mental slavery
entailed upon those bigoted people by their Hogs and Rams, that in spite
of the eternal prating of their savans about _roads_ to Truth, none of
them fell, even by accident, into what we now so distinctly perceive to
be the broadest, the straightest and most available of all mere
roads--the great thoroughfare--the majestic highway of the _Consistent_?
Is it not wonderful that they should have failed to deduce from the
works of God the vitally momentous consideration that _a perfect
consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth_? How plain--how rapid
our progress since the late announcement of this proposition! By its
means, investigation has been taken out of the hands of the ground-moles,
and given as a duty, rather than as a task,