zed and intelligent, to tread the wine-press of
the wrath of God.

I fear I am committing the rhetorical error of comparing small things
with great; but, if Virgil could bring in the Cyclops and their
thunderbolts to illustrate his bees, and Demetrius Phalereus justify it,
you will hardly count it a capital offence in me,--and I don't much care
if you do, if I can only convince you that I am not going to be silent
because I don't know the Alpha and Omega of things. I don't pretend to
be logical, or consistent, or coherent. Nature is not. A forest of oaks
burns down or is cut down, and do oaks spring again? No. Pines. Logic,
is baffled, but the land is bettered. A field of corn is planted, and
Nature does not set herself to protect it, but sends a flock of crows to
devour it; the farmers grumble, but the crows are saved alive. Freezing
water contracts awhile, and then without any provocation turns right
about face and expands; if your pitcher stands in the way, so much the
worse for your pitcher, but the little fishes are grateful; and with all
her whims and inconsequences, Nature gets on from year to year without
once failing of seed-time and harvest, cold or heat. How is it with you
and your logic, you men who have been to college and discovered what you
are talking about? You who discuss politics and decide affairs, are you
not continually accusing each other of sophistry, inconsistency, and
shying away from the point? Take up any political or religious
newspaper, and see, if any faith is to be put in testimony, how
deficient in logic are all these logic-mongers,--how all the learned and
logical are accused by other learned and logical of false assumptions,
of invalid reasoning, of foregone conclusions, of pride and prejudice
and passion. One would say that the result of your profound researches
was only to make you more intensely illogical than you could otherwise
be.

"As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Swifter than they who cannot swim at all,
So in the sea of sophisms, to my thinking.
You have a strange alacrity in sinking."

(_Ego et Dorset fecimus!_)

Sure I am my humble ability in the way of unreason can never compass
fallacies so stupendous as those which you attribute to each other; and
if this is all the result of your logic, I will none of it, initialed to
possess at least the advantage, that, when I write nonsense, I know it
is nonsense, while you write it and think it sense. But you