(sometimes called the "Poughkeepsie Seer") of an odd-looking MS.
which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating
in the Mare Tenebrarum -- a sea well described by the Nubian
geographer, but seldom visited now-a-days, except for the
transcendentalists and divers for crotchets.
Truly yours,
EDGAR A. POE
{this paragraph not in the volume--ED}
ON BOARD BALLOON "SKYLARK"
April, 1, 2848
NOW, my dear friend -- now, for your sins, you are to suffer the
infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I
am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as
tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as
possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some
one or two hundred of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure
excursion, (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!) and I
have no prospect of touching terra firma for a month at least. Nobody
to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the
time to correspond with ones friends. You perceive, then, why it is
that I write you this letter -- it is on account of my ennui and your
sins.
Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed. I mean
to write at you every day during this odious voyage.
Heigho! when will any Invention visit the human pericranium? Are we
forever to be doomed to the thousand inconveniences of the balloon?
Will nobody contrive a more expeditious mode of progress? The
jog-trot movement, to my thinking, is little less than positive
torture. Upon my word we have not made more than a hundred miles the
hour since leaving home! The very birds beat us -- at least some of
them. I assure you that I do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no
doubt, seems slower than it actually is -- this on account of our
having no objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on
account of our going with the wind. To be sure, whenever we meet a
balloon we have a chance of perceiving our rate, and then, I admit,
things do not appear so very bad. Accustomed as I am to this mode of
travelling, I cannot get over a kind of giddiness whenever a balloon
passes us in a current directly overhead. It always seems to me like
an immense bird of prey about to pounce upon us and carry us off in
its claws. One went over us this morning about sunrise, and so nearly
overhead that its drag-rope actually brushed the network suspending
our car, and caused us very serious apprehension. Our captain said
that if the material of the bag had been the trumpery varnished
"silk" of five hundred or a thousand years ago, we should inevitably
have been damaged. This silk, as he explained it to me, was a fabric
composed of the entrails of a species of earth-worm. The worm was
carefully fed on mulberries -- kind of fruit resembling a water-melon
-- and, when sufficiently fat, was crushed in a mill. The paste thus
arising was called papyrus in its primary state, and went through a
variety of processes until it finally became "silk." Singular to
relate, it was once much admired as an article of female dress!
Balloons were also very generally constructed from it. A better kind
of material, it appears, was subsequently found in the down
surrounding the seed-vessels of a plant vulgarly called euphorbium,
and at that time botanically termed milk-weed. This latter kind of
silk was designated as silk-buckingham, on account of its superior
durability, and was usually prepared for use by being varnished with
a solution of gum caoutchouc -- a substance which in some respects
must have resembled the gutta percha now in common use. This
caoutchouc was occasionally called Indian rubber or rubber of twist,
and was no doubt one of the numerous fungi. Never tell me again that
I am not at heart an antiquarian.
Talking of drag-ropes -- our own, it seems, has this moment knocked a
man overboard from one of the small magnetic propellers that swarm in
ocean below us -- a boat of about six thousand tons, and, from all
accounts, shamefully crowded. These diminutive barques should be
prohibited from carrying more than a definite number of passengers.
The man, of course, was not permitted to get on board again, and was
soon out of sight, he and his life-preserver. I rejoice, my dear
friend, that we live in an age so enlightened that no such a thing as
an individual is supposed to exist. It is the mass for which the true
Humanity cares. By-the-by, talking of Humanity, do you know that our
immortal Wiggins is not so original in his views of the Social
Condition and so forth, as his contemporaries are inclined to
suppose? Pundit assures me that the same ideas were put nearly in the
same way, about a thousand years ago, by an Irish philosopher called
Furrier, on account of his keeping a retail shop for cat peltries and
other furs. Pundit knows, you know; there can be no mistake about it.
How very wonderfully do we see verified every day, the profound
observation of the Hindoo Aries Tottle (as quoted by Pundit) -- "Thus
must we say that, not once or twice, or a few times, but with almost
infinite repetitions, the same opinions come round in a circle among
men."
April 2. -- Spoke to-day the magnetic cutter in charge of the middle
section of floating telegraph wires. I learn that when this species
of telegraph was first put into operation by Horse, it was considered
quite impossible to convey the wires over sea, but now we are at a
loss to comprehend where the difficulty lay! So wags the world.
Tempora mutantur -- excuse me for quoting the Etruscan. What would we
do without the Atalantic telegraph? (Pundit says Atlantic was the
ancient adjective.) We lay to a few minutes to ask the cutter some
questions, and learned, among other glorious news, that civil war is
raging in Africa, while the plague is doing its good work beautifully
both in Yurope and Ayesher. Is it not truly remarkable that, before
the magnificent light shed upon philosophy by Humanity, the world was
accustomed to regard War and Pestilence as calamities? Do you know
that prayers were actually offered up in the ancient temples to the
end that these evils (!) might not be visited upon mankind? Is it not
really difficult to comprehend upon what principle of interest our
forefathers acted? Were they so blind as not to perceive that the
destruction of a myriad of individuals is only so much positive
advantage to the mass!
April 3. -- It is really a very fine amusement to ascend the
rope-ladder leading to the summit of the balloon-bag, and thence
survey the surrounding world. From the car below you know the
prospect is not so comprehensive -- you can see little vertically.
But seated here (where I write this) in the luxuriously-cushioned
open piazza of the summit, one can see everything that is going on in
all directions. Just now there is quite a crowd of balloons in sight,
and they present a very animated appearance, while the a
ir is
resonant with the hum of so many millions of human voices. I have
heard it asserted that when Yellow or (Pundit will have it) Violet,
who is supposed to have been the first aeronaut, maintained the
practicability of traversing the atmosphere in all directions, by
merely ascending or descending until a favorable current was
attained, he was scarcely hearkened to at all by his contemporaries,
who looked upon him as merely an ingenious sort of madman, because
the philosophers (?) of the day declared the thing impossible. Really
now it does seem to me quite unaccountable how any thing so obviously
feasible could have escaped the sagacity of the ancient savans. But
in all ages the great obstacles to advancement in Art have been
opposed by the so-called men of science. To be sure, our men of
science are not quite so bigoted as those of old: -- oh, I have
something so queer to tell you on this topic. Do you know that it is
not more than a thousand years ago since the metaphysicians consented
to relieve the people of the singular fancy that there existed but
two possible roads for the attainment of Truth! Believe it if you
can! It appears that long, long ago, in the night of Time, there
lived a Turkish philosopher (or Hindoo possibly) called Aries Tottle.
This person introduced, or at all events propagated what was termed
the deductive or a priori mode of investigation. He started with what
he maintained to be axioms or "self-evident truths," and thence
proceeded "logically" to results. His greatest disciples were one
Neuclid, and one Cant. Well, Aries Tottle flourished supreme until
advent of one Hog, surnamed the "Ettrick Shepherd," who preached an
entirely different system, which he called the a posteriori or
inductive. His plan referred altogether to Sensation. He proceeded by
observing, analyzing, and classifying facts-instantiae naturae, as
they were affectedly called -- into general laws. Aries Tottle's
mode, in a word, was based on noumena; Hog's on phenomena. Well, so
great was the admiration excited by this latter system that, at its
first introduction, Aries Tottle fell into disrepute; but finally he
recovered ground and was permitted to divide the realm of Truth with
his more modern rival. The savans now maintained the Aristotelian and
Baconian roads were the sole possible avenues to knowledge.
"Baconian," you must know, was an adjective invented as equivalent to
Hog-ian and more euphonious and dignified.
Now, my dear friend, I do assure you, most positively, that I
represent this matter fairly, on the soundest authority and you can
easily understand how a notion so absurd on its very face must have
operated to retard the progress of all true knowledge -- which makes
its advances almost invariably by intuitive bounds. The ancient idea
confined investigations to crawling; and for hundreds of years so
great was the infatuation about Hog especially, that a virtual end
was put to all thinking, properly so called. No man dared utter a
truth to which he felt himself indebted to his Soul alone. It
mattered not whether the truth was even demonstrably a truth, for the
bullet-headed savans of the time regarded only the road by which he
had attained it. They would not even look at the end. "Let us see the
means," they cried, "the means!" If, upon investigation of the means,
it was found to come under neither the category Aries (that is to say
Ram) nor under the category Hog, why then the savans went no farther,
but pronounced the "theorist" a fool, and would have nothing to do
with him or his truth.
Now, it cannot be maintained, even, that by the crawling system the
greatest amount of truth would be attained in any long series of
ages, for the repression of imagination was an evil not to be
compensated for by any superior certainty in the ancient modes of
investigation. The error of these Jurmains, these Vrinch, these
Inglitch, and these Amriccans (the latter, by the way, were our own
immediate progenitors), was an error quite analogous with that of the
wiseacre who fancies that he must necessarily see an object the
better the more closely he holds it to his eyes. These people blinded
themselves by details. When they proceeded Hoggishly, their "facts"
were by no means always facts -- a matter of little consequence had
it not been for assuming that they were facts and must be facts
because they appeared to be such. When they proceeded on the path of
the Ram, their course was scarcely as straight as a ram's horn, for
they never had an axiom which was an axiom at all. They must have
been very blind not to see this, even in their own day; for even in
their own day many of the long "established" axioms had been
rejected. For example -- "Ex nihilo nihil fit"; "a body cannot act
where it is not"; "there cannot exist antipodes"; "darkness cannot
come out of light" -- all these, and a dozen other similar
propositions, formerly admitted without hesitation as axioms, 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
Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe Page 128