Eureka: A Prose Poem — Edgar A. Poe, 1848 — reading text

with them, was a point of no moment, whatever : — ' the means !' they vociferated — * let us look at the means !' — and if, on scrutiny of the means, it was found to come neither under the category Hog, nor under the category Aries (which means ram), why then the savans went no farther, but, calling the thinker a fool and THE UNIVERSE. 13 branding him a ' theorist,' would never, thenceforward, have any thing to do either with him or with his truths. "Now, my dear friend," continues the letter- writer, "it cannot be maintained that by the crawling system, exclu sively adopted, men would arrive at the maximum amount of truth, even in any long series of ages ; for the repression of imagination was an evil not to be counterbalanced even by absolute certainty in the snail processes. But their cer tainty was very far from absolute. The error of our pro genitors was quite analogous with that of the wiseacre who fancies he must necessarily see an object the more distinctly, the more closely he holds it to his eyes. They blinded themselves, too, with the impalpable, titillating Scotch snuff of detail ; and thus the boasted facts of the Hog-ites were by no means always facts — a point of little importance but for the assumption that they always were. The vital taint, however, in Baconianism: — its most lamentable fount of error — lay in its tendency to throw power and considera tion into the hands of merely perceptive men — of those inter-Tritonic minnows, the microscopical savans — the dig gers and pedlers of minute facts, for the most part in physi cal science — facts all of which they retailed at the same price upon the highway ; their value depending, it was supposed, simply upon the fact of their fact, without reference to their applicability or inapplicability in the development of those ultimate and only legitimate facts, called Law. " Than the persons" — the letter goes on to say — " Than the persons thus suddenly elevated by the Hog-ian philoso phy into a station for which they were unfitted — thus trans ferred from the sculleries into the parlors of Science — 14 E U HE K A. from its pantries into its pulpits — than these individuals a more intolerant — a more intolerable set of bigots and tyrants never existed on the face of the earth. Their creed, their text and their sermon were, alike, the one word 'fact' — but, for the most part, even of this one word, they knew not even the meaning. On those who ventured to disturb their facts with the view of putting them in order and to use, the disciples of Hog had no mercy whatever. All at tempts at generalization were met at once by the words 'theoretical,' 'theory,' 'theorist' — all thought, to be brief, was very properly resented as a personal affront to them selves. Cultivating the natural sciences to the exclusion of Metaphysics, the Mathematics, and Logic, many of these Bacon-engendered philosophers — one-idead, one-sided and lame of a leg — were more wretchedly helpless — more mis erably ignorant, in view of all the comprehensible objects of knowledge, than the veriest unlettered hind who proves that he knows something at least, in admitting that he knows absolutely nothing. " Nor had our forefathers any better right to talk about certainty, when pursuing, in blind confidence, the a priori path of axioms, or of the Ram. At innumerable points this path was scarcely as straight as a ram's-horn. The simple truth is, that the Aristotelians erected their castles upon a basis far less reliable than air ; for no such things as*axioms ever existed or can possibly exist at all. This they must have been very blind, indeed, not to see, or at least to sus pect ; for, even in their own day, many of their long-ad mitted ' axioms' had been abandoned : — ' ex nihilo nihiljit,' for example, and a 'thing cannot act where it is not/ and THE UNIVERSE. 15 'there cannot be antipodes/ and 'darkness cannot proceed from light.' These and numerous similar propositions for merly accepted, without hesitation, as axioms, or undeniable truths, were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be altogether untenable : — how absurd in these people, then, to persist in relying upon a basis, as immutable, whose mu tability had become so repeatedly manifest ! "But, even through evidence afforded by themselves against themselves, it is easy to convict these a priori reasoners of the grossest unreason — it is easy to show the futility — the impalpability of their axioms in general. I have now lying before me" — it will be observed that we still proceed with the letter — " I have now lying before me a book printed about a thousand years ago. Pundit assures me that it is decidedly the cleverest ancient work on its topic, which is ' Logic/ The author, who was much esteemed in his day, was one Miller, or Mill ; and we find it recorded of him, as a point of some importance, that he rode a mill-horse whom he called Jeremy Bentham : — but let us glance at the volume itself! " Ah ! — ' Ability or inability to conceive/ says Mr. Mill very properly, ' is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth/ Now, that this is a palpable truism no one in his senses will deny. Not to admit the proposition, is to insinuate a charge of variability in Truth itself, whose very title is a synonym of the Steadfast. , If ability to con ceive be taken as a criterion of Truth, then a truth to David Hume would very seldom be a truth to Joe ; and ninety-nine hundredths of what is undeniable in Heaven would be demonstrable falsity upon Earth. The proposition 16 EUREKA. of Mr. Mill, then, is sustained. I will not grant it to be an axiom ; and this merely because I am showing that no axioms exist ; but, with a distinction which could not have been cavilled at even by Mr. Mill himself, 1 am ready to grant that, if an axiom there be, then the proposition of which we speak has the fullest right to be considered an axiom — that no more absolute axiom is — and, consequently, that any subsequent proposition which shall conflict with this one primarily advanced, must be either a falsity in itself — that is to say no axiom — or, if admitted axiomatic, must at once neutralize both itself and its predecessor. " And now, by the logic of their own propounder, let us proceed to test any one of the axioms propounded. Let us give Mr. Mill the fairest of play. We will bring the point to no ordinary issue. We will select for investigation no common-place axiom — no axiom of what, not the less pre posterously because only impliedly, he terms his secondary class — as if a positive truth by definition could be either more or less positively a truth : — we will select, I say, no axiom of an unquestionability so questionable as is to be found in Euclid. We will not talk, for example, about such propositions as that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, or that the whole is greater than any one of its parts. We will afford the logician every advantage. We will come at once to a proposition which he regards as the acme of the unquestionable — as the quintessence of axiomatic undeni- ability. Here it is: — 'Contradictions cannot both be true — that is, cannot coexist in nature.' Here Mr. Mill means, for instance, — and I give the most forcible instance conceiv able — that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree — that THE UNIVERSE. 17 it cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree : — all which is quite reasonable of itself and will answer remark ably well as an axiom, until we bring it into collation with an axiom insisted upon a few pages before — in other words — words which I have previously employed — until we test it by the logic of its own propounder. ' A tree,' Mr. Mill asserts, ' must be either a tree or not a tree.' Very well : — and now let me ask him, why. To this little query there is but one response : — I defy any man living to invent a second. The sole answer is this : — * Because we find it impossible to conceive that a tree can be any thing else than a tree or not a tree.' This, I repeat, is Mr. Mill's sole answer : — he will not pretend to suggest another : — and yet, by his own showing, his answer is clearly no answer at all ; for has he not already required us to admit, as an axiom, that ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic truth? Thus all — absolutely all his argumentation is at sea without a rudder. Let it not be urged that an exception from the general rule is to be made, in cases where the ' impossibility to con ceive' is so peculiarly great as when we are called upon to conceive a tree both a tree and not a tree. Let no attempt, I say, be made at urging this sotticism ; for, in the first place, there are no degrees of ' impossibility,' and thus no one impossible conception can be more peculiarly impossible than another impossible conception : — in the second place, Mr. Mill himself, no doubt after thorough deliberation, has most distinctly, and most rationally, excluded all opportu nity for exception, by the emphasis of his proposition, that, in no case, is ability or inability to conceive, to be taken as 18 EUREKA. a criterion of axiomatic truth : — in the third place, even were exceptions admissible at all, it remains to be shown how any exception is admissible here. That a tree can be both a tree and not a tree, is an idea which the angels, or the devils, may entertain, and which no doubt many an earthly Bedlamite, or Transcendentalist, does. " Now I do not quarrel with these ancients," continues the letter- writer, " so much on account of the transparent frivolity of their logic — which, to be plain, was baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether — as on account of their pompous and infatuate proscription of all other roads to Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths — the one of creeping and the other of crawling — to which, in their ignorant perversity, they have dared to confine the Soul — the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognizant of 'path.' " By the bye, my dear friend, is it not an evidence of the mental slavery entailed upon those bigoted people by