(or Hindoo possibly) called Aries Tottle.  This person introduced, or at all events propagated what was termed the deductive or a priori mode of investigation.  He started with what he maintained to be axioms or “self-evident truths,” and thence proceeded “logically” to results.  His greatest disciples were one Neuclid, and one Cant.  Well, Aries Tottle flourished supreme until advent of one Hog, surnamed the “Ettrick Shepherd,” who preached an entirely different system, which he called the a posteriori or inductive.  His plan referred altogether to Sensation.  He proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts-instantiae naturae, as they were affectedly called —­ into general laws.  Aries Tottle’s mode, in a word, was based on noumena; Hog’s on phenomena.  Well, so great was the admiration excited by this latter system that, at its first introduction, Aries Tottle fell into disrepute; but finally he recovered ground and was permitted to divide the realm of Truth with his more modern rival.  The savans now maintained the Aristotelian and Baconian roads were the sole possible avenues to knowledge.  “Baconian,” you must know, was an adjective invented as equivalent to Hog-ian and more euphonious and dignified.

Now, my dear friend, 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”