ing that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity
of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another;
that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated." It gives
one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on
the brain, or powdered grasshopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when
he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we
see that he anticipates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of
night lie between them.

Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:

_Definitions:_

All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.

Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal to
one another.

A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.

The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram--that is, an
oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to anything.

A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that meet
together, but are not on the same floor.

All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.

_Postulates and Propositions:_

A pie may be produced any number of times.

The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of
propositions.

A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By
Allen's.

The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not meet.

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at the
Phalanstery.

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two
charges for the same thing.

If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the side
of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and the
wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle
between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the weekly bills
of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill be the greater,
then the other bill is less than it might have been, which is absurd.
Therefore the bills are equal.

_Quod erat demonstrandum._

* * * * *

The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To
philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a
certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either
the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the
past behind him, and dives into the f