The Murders In The Rue Morgue
contributor: Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
creator: Poe, Edgar Allen
date: 0000-00-00
extent: 80997
format: text/plain
language: en
publisher: Eris Etext Project
rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
source: 74
subject: voice
subject: dupin
subject: house
subject: head
subject: door
subject: frenchman
subject: puzzling
subject: questions
subject: beyond
subject: conjecture
subject: poe
subject: edgar
subject: allen
subject: murders
subject: rue
subject: morgue
subject: american
subject: literature
type: text
local mirror: poe-murders-693.txt
concordance: http://infomotions.com/alex/cgi-bin/concordance.pl
plain html: poe-murders-693.htm
sort title: Murders In The Rue Morgue, The
full text: 1841 THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE by Edgar Allan Poe THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture. --SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Urn-Burial. THE mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talents into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition. The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and var…