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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



that of the reductio per impossibile by means of a 

 satirical story. The difficulty of all allegory, as 

 the "Faerie Queene" and "Pilgrim's Progress," 

 but more notably Fletcher's " Purple Island," 

 show, is to invent a colorable narrative which, 

 though perfect as a concatenation of interesting 

 incidents, shall never for one moment cease to 

 "run on all-fours" with the philosophical motif 

 that gave it birth. The flow of the story should 

 have the apparent freedom of a river, though all 

 the while confined within the artificial banks of 

 a canal. But when the allegory is satirical, the 

 difficulty is intensified ; for, then, the moment the 

 incidents cease to be, by their very statement, a 

 satire upon the theory attacked, the satire ceases 

 to bite at once, and forever. 



The greatest master of the style is, of course, 

 Swift, though Rabelais and Lucian are not far 

 inferior to him. But the case most familiar to 

 the general reader will be that of Nathaniel Haw- 

 thorne, who excels not so much in the " Blithe- 

 dale Romance " (where the requirements of the 

 realistic novel interfere every now and then with 

 the satire upon the Brook Farm scheme) as in 

 such admirable work as " The Celestial Railroad," 

 "The Birthmark," and such like stories of the 

 "Mosses from an Old Manse." Not for an in- 

 stant in these does he quit the heart's core of 

 the idea satirized ; not a single word is there that 

 does not bite like aquafortis. It is when com- 

 pared with the work of a master like this that 

 the feebleness of Mr. Mallock's satire becomes 

 apparent. 



Suppose that a true satirist had introduced, 

 for the purpose of satirizing positivism, a male 

 and female positivist upon an uninhabited island 

 to play Paul and Virginia there on altruistic prin- 

 ciples. His notion of satirizing the positivist 

 would not, we may be sure, have been like Mr. 

 Mallock's, which is as primitive and free from 

 subtilty as that of a satirist of the middle ages — 

 consisting, in short, of placing in absurd situa- 

 tions those with whose opinions he disagrees, and 

 setting them to perform all sorts of buffooneries 

 and repeat stock phrases. A married positivist 

 professor, having been shipwrecked upon an un- 

 inhabited island in company with a married Ro- 

 manist lady, converts her to positivism, and the 

 entire story consists in the characters repeating 

 over and over again certain phrases of Prof. Tyn- 

 dall's and Mr. Frederic Harrison's, and perform- 

 ing practical jokes of the most meaningless and 

 farcical kind. Of genuine humor there is not a 

 trace; of wit there is not a scintillation, though 

 there is much elaboration of epigram. 



The sophism lies in ignoring the fact that, if 

 it is an easy task to place Prof. Clifford on an 

 island and make him play the fool, it is just as 

 easy to place Cardinal Manning there, and make 

 him do likewise ; in neither case is the 7-educlio 

 ad absurdum achieved. As we have said, sup- 

 pose Hawthorne had treated such a subject — in- 

 stead of making his characters repeat certain 

 sayings of Prof. Tyndall's, Prof. Huxley's, Prof. 

 Clifford's, and Mr. Frederic Harrison's — sayings 

 which, not absurd in themselves, are absurd only 

 when misplaced — every word and every incident 

 would have exposed the infirmities of positivism 

 itself. Not a word but would have brought out 

 that element of incongruity which is at the basis 

 of all satire, of all wit, of all humor. As his nar- 

 rative went on his readers would have laughed 

 with him as he made them see more and more 

 clearly that, with the exception of the ontological 

 views of the ostrich with his head in the sand, 

 there is nothing so comic as M. Comte's famous 

 " leading conception " of the three phases of in- 

 tellectual evolution : the theological, the meta- 

 physical, and, lastly, the positive. He would 

 have given happy illustrations of the human 

 mind, finding itself somewhere, beginning by 

 asking itself who could possibly have put it 

 there ; then proceeding to ask if it is really there 

 after all ; and, finally, deciding on Comtean prin- 

 ciples that it is undoubtedly there, and that the 

 knowledge of being there is absolute wisdom. 



In order to satirize the thinker who tells us 

 that " to him the principle of all certitude is the 

 testimony of the senses," he would have intro- 

 duced not a speaking roast-pig talking irrelevant 

 nonsense (as Mr. Mallock does), but a jelly-fish 

 from the island-beach who should tell the philos- 

 opher that, from the certitude of his own gelati- 

 nous senses, he was sure that the philosopher's 

 certitude was wrong, as he could vouch for light 

 and color and perfume being not several, but 

 one. 



In order to prove that the positivist's mind 

 is not only unphilosophical, but anti-philosophic, 

 the satirist would laughingly have shown that in 

 the onward march of those very physical sciences 

 he adores, he, with his primitive and confiding 

 " belief in the testimony of the senses," is begin- 

 ning to be left out in the cold, and that men like 

 Sir W. R. Grove, turning round upon the positiv- 

 ist in the most traitorous fashion, are beginning 

 to tell him that " the principle of all certitude " 

 is not, and cannot be, the testimony of the posi- 

 tivist's senses ; that these senses, indeed, are no 

 absolute tests of phenomena at all ; that probably 



