to the true--to the _only_ true
thinkers--to the generally-educated men of ardent imagination. These
latter--our Keplers--our Laplaces--'speculate'--'theorize'--these are the
terms--can you not fancy the shout of scorn with which they would be
received by our progenitors, were it possible for them to be looking over
my shoulders as I write? The Keplers, I repeat, speculate--theorize--and
their theories are merely corrected--reduced--sifted--cleared, little by
little, of their chaff of inconsistency--until at length there stands
apparent an unencumbered _Consistency_--a consistency which the most
stolid admit--because it _is_ a consistency--to be an absolute and an
unquestionable _Truth_.

"I have often thought, my friend, that it must have puzzled these
dogmaticians of a thousand years ago, to determine, even, by which of
their two boasted roads it is that the cryptographist attains the
solution of the more complicate cyphers--or by which of them Champollion
guided mankind to those important and innumerable truths which, for so
many centuries, have lain entombed amid the phonetical hieroglyphics of
Egypt. In especial, would it not have given these bigots some trouble to
determine by which of their two roads was reached the most momentous and
sublime of _all_ their truths--the truth--the fact of _gravitation_?
Newton deduced it from the laws of Kepler. Kepler admitted that these
laws he _guessed_--these laws whose investigation disclosed to the
greatest of British astronomers that principle, the basis of all
(existing) physical principle, in going behind which we enter at once
the nebulous kingdom of Metaphysics. Yes!--these vital laws Kepler
_guessed_--that is to say, he _imagined_ them. Had he been asked to point
out either the _de_ductive or _in_ductive route by which he attained
them, his reply might have been--'I know nothing about _routes_--but I
_do_ know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with
_my soul_--I reached it through mere dint of _intuition_.' Alas, poor
ignorant old man! Could not any metaphysician have told him that what he
called 'intuition' was but the conviction resulting from _de_ductions or
_in_ductions of which the processes were so shadowy as to have escaped
his consciousness, eluded his reason, or bidden defiance to his capacity
of expression? How great a pity it is that some 'moral philosopher' had
not enlightened him about all this! How it would have comforted him on
his