end, I do assure you, most positively, that I represent
this matter fairly, on the soundest authority and you can easily
understand how a notion so absurd on its very face must have operated
to retard the progress of all true knowledge--which makes its advances
almost invariably by intuitive bounds. The ancient idea confined
investigations to crawling; and for hundreds of years so great was the
infatuation about Hog especially, that a virtual end was put to all
thinking, properly so called. No man dared utter a truth to which he
felt himself indebted to his Soul alone. It mattered not whether the
truth was even demonstrably a truth, for the bullet-headed savans of the
time regarded only the road by which he had attained it. They would not
even look at the end. "Let us see the means," they cried, "the means!"
If, upon investigation of the means, it was found to come under neither
the category Aries (that is to say Ram) nor under the category Hog, why
then the savans went no farther, but pronounced the "theorist" a fool,
and would have nothing to do with him or his truth.

Now, it cannot be maintained, even, that by the crawling system the
greatest amount of truth would be attained in any long series of ages,
for the repression of imagination was an evil not to be compensated for
by any superior certainty in the ancient modes of investigation.
The error of these Jurmains, these Vrinch, these Inglitch, and these
Amriccans (the latter, by the way, were our own immediate progenitors),
was an error quite analogous with that of the wiseacre who fancies that
he must necessarily see an object the better the more closely he holds
it to his eyes. These people blinded themselves by details. When they
proceeded Hoggishly, their "facts" were by no means always facts--a
matter of little consequence had it not been for assuming that they
were facts and must be facts because they appeared to be such. When they
proceeded on the path of the Ram, their course was scarcely as straight
as a ram's horn, for they never had an axiom which was an axiom at all.
They must have been very blind not to see this, even in their own day;
for even in their own day many of the long "established" axioms had been
rejected. For example--"Ex nihilo nihil fit"; "a body cannot act where
it is not"; "there cannot exist antipodes"; "darkness cannot come out
of light"--all these, and a dozen other similar propositions, formerly
admitted without hesitation as axioms