72 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion, and, on being told that it is likely to prove too learned to amuse 

 her, only insists the more on the perfect capacity of her sex for the 

 reception of the most philosophic ideas, and demands a lesson on the 

 stars at once. 



"No!" replies Fontenelle, "never shall it he said of me that in a 

 wood, at ten o'clock at night, I talked philosophy to the most charm- 

 ing person of my acquaintance. Seek your philosophers elsewhere ! " 



But it is vain for him to try to bring the conversation back to its 

 former channel, and to represent how much better it would be to talk 

 nonsense, " as any reasonable people would do in our place" he has 

 to yield ; but the dialogue, often very lively, is represented through 

 the book as carried on by the gentleman with the wish to pay his 

 court under cover of talking science ; while the lady is ever on the 

 alert to call him back to his ostensible theme when she finds him 

 trying to wander from it. We must perforce omit this in giving only 

 a part, and that chiefly Fontenelle's ; but even in teaching he will be 

 found anything but dull. As his pupil is as ignorant as she is intel- 

 ligent, he begins at the beginning : 



" All philosophy, I said, is founded on two facts, that we have 

 curious minds and poor eyes, for if your eyes were better you might see 

 for yourself if the stars were suns lighting other worlds, or if, on the 

 other hand, you felt less curiosity, you would not care to learn, which 

 would come to the same thing ; but everybody wants to know more 

 than he can see, and there is the difficulty. If we could even see un- 

 mistakably what we see at all, that would be something gained, but 

 we see quite wrongly, and so your true philosophers pass their lives 

 in the unenviable condition of doubting what they do see, and trying 

 to divine what they cannot. I always think of Nature as a great 

 spectacle, something like the opera. From your opera-box you do 

 not see the theatre quite as it really is, for the scenes and stage-appa- 

 ratus are arranged for effect at a distance, and they keep the weights 

 and wheels which put all in motion out of your sight. Naturally, you 

 do not pay much attention to the principle on which all this works. 

 But then, again, there may be a machinist down by the orchestra, 

 who is puzzled by some stage-flight, which is unaccountable to him, 

 and who feels that he must find out how it was done. 



"The machinist, you observe, is something like the philosophers; 

 but what makes the difficulty worse for them is, that in Nature's ma- 

 chines the cords are all hidden hidden so neatly that people were a 

 long time conjecturing as to what caused the movements of the uni- 

 verse. Just imagine, for instance, Pythagoras, and your Platos and 

 Aristotles, at the opera they and all their kind whose names are 

 in such reputation. Suppose that they saw the representation of 

 Phaethon borne off by the winds, that they could not discover the 

 cords, and did not know what lay behind the scenes. One of them " 

 (the author is here giving us samples of the philosophy still current 



