1850
DIDDLING
Considered as One of the Exact Sciences
by Edgar Allen Poe
DIDDLING
Hey, diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle
SINCE the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a
Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been
much admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. The
other gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences, and was a
great man in a great way- I may say, indeed, in the very greatest of
ways.
Diddling- or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle- is
sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing
diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a
tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining-
not the thing, diddling, in itself- but man, as an animal that
diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the
affront of the picked chicken.
Very pertinently it was demanded of Plato, why a picked chicken,
which was clearly "a biped without feathers," was not, according to
his own definition, a man? But I am not to be bothered by any
similar query. Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal
that diddles but man. It will take an entire hen-coop of picked
chickens to get over that.
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