The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition: Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five VolumesPoe, Edgar Allan
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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition: Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes
Poe, Edgar Allan
American fiction -- 19th century; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales, American; Indexes; Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849; Short stories
apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of
affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is
in full possession of the contents of each hand, and
thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of
purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces
of their own.
The analytical power should not be confounded with ample
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.
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