The history of the origin of the theory is brief.  The Chatelaine of a certain sugar plantation in Louisiana, in preparing a list of guests for her house-party, discovered, in one of those explosive moments of inspiration, that all people were easily divided into two fundamental groups or families, the Sulphites and the Bromides.  The revelation was apodictic, convincing; it made life a different thing; it made society almost plausible.  So, too, it simplified human relationship and gave the first hint of a method by which to adjust and equalize affinities.  The primary theorems sprang quickly into her mind, and, such is their power, they have attained almost the nature of axioms.  The discovery, indeed, was greater, more far-reaching than she knew, for, having undergone the test of philosophical analysis as well as of practical application, it stands, now, a vital, convincing interpretation of the mysteries of human nature.

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We have all tried our hands at categories.  Philosophy is, itself, but a system of definitions.  What, then, made the Chatelaine’s theory remarkable, when Civilization has wearied itself with distinctions?  The attempt to classify one’s acquaintance is the common sport of the thinker, from the fastidious who says:  “There are two kinds of persons—­those who like olives and those who don’t,” to the fatuous, immemorial lover who says:  “There are two kinds of women—­Daisy, and the Other Kind!”

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Previous attempts, less fantastic, have had this fault in common:  their categories were susceptible of gradation—­extremes fused one into the other.  What thinking person has not felt the need of some definite, final, absolute classification?  We speak of “my kind” and “the other sort,” of Those who Understand, of Impossibles, and Outsiders.  Some of these categories have attained considerable vogue.  There is the Bohemian versus the Philistine, the Radical versus the Conservative, the Interesting versus the Bores, and so on.  But always there is a shifting population at the vague frontier—­the types intermingle and lose identity.  Your Philistine is the very one who says:  “This is Liberty Hall!”—­and one must drink beer whether one likes it or not.  It is the conservative business man, hard-headed, stubborn, who is converted by the mind-reader or the spiritualistic medium—­one extreme flying to the other.  It is the bore who, at times, unconsciously to himself, amuses you to the point of repressed laughter.  These terms are fluent—­your friends have a way of escaping from the labeled boxes into which you have put them; they seem to defy your definitions, your Orders and Genera.  Fifteen minutes’ consideration of the great Sulphitic Theory will, as the patent medicines say, convince one of its efficacy.  A Bromide will never jump out of his box into that ticketed “Sulphite.”

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