ng fast its
strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of
day;--it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case
the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a
jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case,
shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and
accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear.

"It is a trait all the more to be insisted on in these very times,
because there is so strong a drift toward a seeming clearness which is
a real confusion. By two opposite methods do men now seek to reach
that underlying order and majestic simplicity which more and more
appear to mark this universe. The one distinguishes, the other
confounds, things that certainly differ. The one system belongs to the
reality and grandeur of nature, the other to the pettiness and
perverseness of man. Not a few seem bent on seeing simplicity and
uniformity by the short process of shutting their eyes upon actual
diversity. They proceed not by analytical incision, but by summary
excision. They work with the cleaver and not with the scalpel. What
singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness,
what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what
kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the
deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!'
What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of
structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however
eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together
two plates of metal with the agency which corrodes or dissolves both
in an acid, or to identify the affinity that forms chemical
combinations with the vitality that so steadily overrides, suspends,
and counteracts those affinities, is this an ascent into the pure
ether, or a plunge in the Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every
possible criterion, a man claims that there is but 'one ultimate form
of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter
are built up,' is this the advance march of chemistry, or the
retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and
taking, firmly assumes that there is no essential difference in
objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and
mysterious thing, _life_, is that the height of wisdom, or the depth
of folly? And how such a central paralysis