, 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.

By the by, my dear friend, do you not think it would have puzzled these
ancient dogmaticians to have determined by which of their two roads it
was tha