“Dear Sir:—­In your paper of July 29, I find some comments on ‘Eureka,’ a late book of my own; and I know you too well to suppose for a moment, that you will refuse me the privilege of a few words in reply.  I feel, even, that I might safely claim, from Mr. Hoffman, the right, which every author has, of replying to his critic tone for tone—­that is to say, of answering your correspondent, flippancy by flippancy and sneer by sneer—­but in the first place, I do not wish to disgrace the World; and, in the second, I feel that I never should be done sneering, in the present instance, were I once to begin.  Lamartine blames Voltaire for the use which he made of (ruse) misrepresentation, in his attacks on the priesthood; but our young students of Theology do not seem to be aware that in defense or what they fancy to be defense, of Christianity, there is anything wrong in such gentlemanly peccadillos as the deliberate perversion of an author’s text—­to say nothing of the minor indecora of reviewing a book without reading it and without having the faintest suspicion of what it is about.

“You will understand that it is merely the misrepresentations of the critique in question to which I claim the privilege of reply:—­the mere opinions of the writer can be of no consequence to me—­and I should imagine of very little to himself—­that is to say if he knows himself, personally, as well as I have the honor of knowing him.  The first misrepresentation is contained in this sentence:—­’This letter is a keen burlesque on the Aristotelian or Baconian methods of ascertaining Truth, both of which the writer ridicules and despises, and pours forth his rhapsodical ecstasies in a glorification of the third mode—­the noble art of guessing.’  What I really say is this:—­That there is no absolute certainty either in the Aristotelian or Baconian process—­that, for this reason, neither Philosophy is so profound as it fancies itself—­and that neither has a right to sneer at that seemingly imaginative process called Intuition (by which the great Kepler attained his laws); since ‘Intuition,’ after all, ’is but the conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason or defy our capacity of expression.’  The second misrepresentation runs thus:—­’The developments of electricity and the formation of stars and suns, luminous and nonluminous, moons and planets, with their rings, &c., is deduced, very much according to the nebular theory of Laplace, from the principle propounded above.’  Now the impression intended to be made here upon the reader’s mind, by the ‘Student of Theology,’ is evidently, that my theory may all be very well in its way, but that it is nothing but Laplace over again, with some modifications that he (the Student of Theology) cannot regard as at all important.  I have only to say that no gentleman