You can hire logic, in
the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can
buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of
Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span,
that couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other. Logicians
carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these are the true
explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I
understand truth,--not for any secondary artifice in handling his ideas.
Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.
I should not trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a
good chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily
because he wrangles or plays well.
The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts
his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with truth as I understand
truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and said I talked like a
transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good enough for him.
Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, _as you understand it_.
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