Out of Context

From Volume 4 of The Raven Edition of The Works of E.A.P.

Mellonta Taunta
Edgar Allan Poe

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 roar.

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 that the most important and most sublime of all their truths was, in effect, attained? I mean the truth of Gravitation. Newton owed it to Kepler. Kepler admitted that his three laws were guessed at–these three laws of all laws which led the great Inglitch mathematician to his principle, the basis of all physical principle–to go behind which we must enter the Kingdom of Metaphysics. Kepler guessed–that is to sy imagined. He was essentially a “theorist”–that word now of so much sanctity, formerly an epithet of contempt. Would it not have puzzled these old moles too, to have explained by which of the two “roads” a cryptographist unriddles a cryptograph of more than usual secrecy, or by which of the two roads Champollion directed mankind to those enduring and almost innumerable truths which resulted from his deciphering the Hieroglyphics.