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, were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be untenable.  How absurd in these people, then, to persist in putting faith in “axioms” as immutable bases of Truth!  But even out of the mouths of their soundest reasoners it is easy to demonstrate the futility, the impalpability of their axioms in general.  Who was the soundest of their logicians?  Let me see!  I will go and ask Pundit and be back in a minute....  Ah, here we have it!  Here is a book written nearly a thousand years ago and lately translated from the Inglitch —­ which, by the way, appears to have been the rudiment of the Amriccan.  Pundit says it is decidedly the cleverest ancient work on its topic, Logic.  The author (who was much thought of in his day) was one Miller, or Mill; and we find it recorded of him, as a point of some importance, that he had a mill-horse called Bentham.  But let us glance at the treatise!

Ah! —­ “Ability or inability to conceive,” says Mr. Mill, very properly, “is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth.”  What modern in his senses would ever think of disputing this truism?  The only wonder with us must be, how it happened that Mr. Mill conceived it necessary even to hint at any thing so obvious.  So far good —­ but let us turn over another paper.  What have we here? —­ “Contradictories cannot both be true —­ that is, cannot co-exist in nature.”  Here Mr. Mill means, for example, that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree —­ that it cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree.  Very well; but I ask him why.  His reply is this —­ and never pretends to be any thing else than this —­ “Because it is impossible to conceive that contradictories can both be true.”  But this is no answer at all, by his own showing, for has he not just admitted as a truism that “ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth.”

Now I do not complain of these ancients so much because their logic is, by their own showing, utterly baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether, as because of their pompous and imbecile proscription of all other roads of Truth, of all other means for its attainment than the two preposterous paths —­ the one of creeping and the one of crawling —­ to which they have dared to confine the Soul that loves nothing so well as to soar.