This peculiarity of his style is connected with other qualities upon
which a great deal of eulogy has been bestowed. There are two faculties
in which, so far as my experience goes, no man, woman, or child ever
admits his or her own deficiency. The driest of human beings will boast
of their sense of humour; and the most perplexed, of their logical
acuteness. De Quincey has been highly praised, both as a humorist and as
a logician. He believed in his own powers, and exhibits them rather
ostentatiously. He says, pleasantly enough, but not without a substratum
of real conviction, that he is 'a _doctor seraphicus_, and also
_inexpugnabilis_ upon quillets of logic.' I confess that I am generally
sceptical as to the merits of infallible dialecticians, because I have
observed that a man's reputation for inexorable logic is generally in
proportion to the error of his conclusions. A logician, in popular
estimation, seems to be one who never shrinks from a _reductio ad
absurdum_. His merits are measured, not by the accuracy of his
conclusions, but by the distance which separates them from his
premisses. The explanation doubtless lies in the general impression that
logic is concerned with words and not with things. There is a vague
belief that by skilfully linking syllogisms you can form a chain
sufficiently strong to cross the profoundest abyss, and which will need
no test of observation and verification. A dexterous performer, it is
supposed, might pass from one extremity of the universe to the other
without ever touching ground; and people do not observe that the refusal
to draw an inference may be just as great a proof of logical skill as
ingenuity in drawing it. Now De Quincey's claim to infallibility would
be plausible, if we still believed that to define words accurately is
the same thing as to discover facts, and that binding them skilfully
together is equivalent to reasoning securely. He is a kind of rhetorical
Euclid. He makes such a flourish with his apparatus of axioms and
definitions that you do not suspect any lurking fallacy. He is careful
to show you the minutest details of his argumentative mechanism. Each
step in the process is elaborately and separately set forth; you are not
assumed to know anything, or to be capable of supplying any links for
yourself; it shall not even be taken for granted without due notice that
things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other; and the
consequence is, that few