the party had turned outward the faces of their own.
The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for
while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often
remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power,
by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists
(I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a
primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect
bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation
among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there
exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and
the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be
found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly
imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the
light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced.
Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 18—, I
there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. This young
gentleman was of an excellent, indeed of an illustrious family, but, by
a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the
energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir
himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes. By
courtesy of his creditors, there still remained in his possession a small
remnant of his patrimony; and, upon the income arising from this, he
managed, by means of a rigorous economy, to procure the necessaries of
life, without troubling himself about its superfluities. Books, indeed,
were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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