ay preach infant damnation and be a
merry father at home.

* * * * *

Such considerations point inevitably to the truth that our theory
depends essentially not upon action or talk, but upon the quality and
rationale of thought. It is a question of Potentiality, rather than of
Dynamics. It is the process of reasoning which concerns us, not its
translation into conduct. A man may be a devoted supporter of Mrs.
Grundy and yet be a Sulphite, if he has, in his own mind, reached an
original conclusion that society needs her safeguards. He may be the
wildest-eyed of Anarchists and yet bromidic, if he has accepted
another's reasons and swallowed the propaganda whole.

It will be doubtless through a misconception of this principle that the
first schism in the Sulphitic Theory arises. Already the cult has
become so important that a newer heretic sect threatens it. These
protestants cannot believe that there is a definite line to be drawn
between Sulphites and Bromides, and hold that one may partake of a dual
nature. All such logic is fatuous, and founded upon a misconception of
the Theory.

* * * * *

There is, however, a subtlety which has perhaps had something to do
with confusing the neophyte. It is this: Sulphitism and Bromidism are,
symbolically, the two halves of a circle, and their extremes meet. One
may be so extremely bromidic that one becomes, at a leap, sulphitic,
and _vice versa_. This may be easily illustrated.

* * * * *

Miss Herford's inimitable monologues, being each the apotheosis of some
typical Bromide--a shopgirl, a country dressmaker, a bargain-hunter and
so on--become, through her art, intensely sulphitic. They are
excruciatingly funny, just because she represents types so common that
we recognize them instantly. Each expresses the crystallized thought of
her particular bromidic group. Done, then, by a person who is herself a
Sulphite _par excellence_, the result is droll. "One has," says
Emerson, "but to remove an object from its environment and instantly it
becomes comic."

* * * * *

The same thing is done less artistically every day upon the vaudeville
stage. We love to recognize types; and what Browning said of beauty:

We're made so that we love
First, when we see them painted,
Things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see

can be easi