Previous attempts, less fantastic, have had this fault in common: their
categories were susceptible of gradation--extremes fused one into the
other. What thinking person has not felt the need of some definite,
final, absolute classification? We speak of "my kind" and "the other
sort," of Those who Understand, of Impossibles, and Outsiders. Some of
these categories have attained considerable vogue. There is the
Bohemian versus the Philistine, the Radical versus the Conservative,
the Interesting versus the Bores, and so on. But always there is a
shifting population at the vague frontier--the types intermingle and
lose identity. Your Philistine is the very one who says: "This is
Liberty Hall!"--and one must drink beer whether one likes it or not. It
is the conservative business man, hard-headed, stubborn, who is
converted by the mind-reader or the spiritualistic medium--one extreme
flying to the other. It is the bore who, at times, unconsciously to
himself, amuses you to the point of repressed laughter. These terms are
fluent--your friends have a way of escaping from the labeled boxes into
which you have put them; they seem to defy your definitions, your
Orders and Genera. Fifteen minutes' consideration of the great
Sulphitic Theory will, as the patent medicines say, convince one of its
efficacy. A Bromide will never jump out of his box into that ticketed
"Sulphite."

* * * * *

So much comment has been made upon the terminology of this theory that
it should be stated frankly, at the start, that the words Sulphite and
Bromide, and their derivatives, sulphitic and bromidic, are themselves
so sulphitic that they are not susceptible of explanation. In a word,
they are empirical, although, accidentally it might seem, they do