A CRITICISM OF "THE NEW PAUL AND VIRGINIA: 1 477 



(as Sir W. R. Grove assured the British Associa- 

 tion once) the positivists are surrounded by be- 

 ings they could neither see, feel, hear, nor smell ; 

 and that, notwithstanding the excellence of their 

 own eyes, ears, and noses, the universe they were 

 mapping out so deftly is, and must be, lightless, 

 colorless, soundless— monophysical— a phantas- 

 magoric show— a deceptive series of undulations, 

 which become color, or sound, or what not, ac- 

 cording to the organism upon which they fall. It 

 may be said that, in order to satirize after this 

 fashion, there must be an exhaustive knowledge 

 of the subject satirized : of course, there must. 

 But masters never set to work without an ex- 

 haustive knowledge. It may almost be said that 

 the idea of Swift's " Tale of a Tub " might have 

 occurred to any man. But to treat it adequately 

 — to give it any kind of vitality — there were req- 

 uisite not only Swift's sardonic humor, his keen 

 and trenchant intellect, but also his profound 

 knowledge of the ecclesiastical subjects, allusion 

 to which gave life to every sentence. Now, here 

 is just our quarrel with Mr. Mallock, that, setting 

 out to deal with metaphysical and physical ques- 

 tions, he has not even the litterateur's knowledge 

 of physics or metaphysics. He has evidently 

 read certain magazine articles of Mr. Frederic 

 Harrison, of Prof. Clifford, and of Prof. Tyndall ; 

 he seems to be aware that Prof. Huxley believes 

 man to have descended from some earlier form ; 

 and to have gathered that there was once a good 

 deal of heavy scientific fun got out of the " miss- 

 ing link ; " he also knows that the scientists gen- 

 erally have the credit of being materialists, and 

 of being as narrow and bigoted in their material- 

 ism as the Church of Home in its spiritualism. 

 He quotes, indeed, those rather unwise words of 

 Prof. Tyndall, " The world will have religion of 

 some kind, even though it should fly for it to the 

 intellectual whoredom of spiritualism." Beyond 

 this he seems to have no knowledge whatever of 

 what positivism really is, and the place it takes 

 in the march of human thought. He seems to 

 think that positivism was invented by Comte, 

 and the evolution hypothesis by Mr. Darwin. He 

 does not know that positivism, the philosophy of 

 acceptance being entirely an affair of tempera- 

 ment, is necessarily as old as the race itself. 

 Nor does he seem to be aware of the teaching of 

 writers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epicte- 

 tus, where the secular humanitarianism of Con- 

 fucius and Comte has been sublimated perhaps to 

 its highest possible point. And that there have 



been always, and always will be, materialists and 

 spiritualists, as there have always been and al- 

 ways will be evolutionists and upholders of the 

 special-creation hypothesis. 



For such a writer to throw ridicule upon some 

 of the most illustrious savants of the age is much 

 as though he should write a satire upon the Indo- 

 European theory of languages without a knowl- 

 edge of Sanskrit. Not that we object to their 

 being satirized, if the satirist knows what he is 

 about. The philosophers have been made the 

 subjects of satire from the days of Aristophanes 

 downward ; and, if the scientists are now coming 

 in for their share, it is because they are now more 

 en rapport with the popular mind. That a tem- 

 per such as that of the modern positivist is, to 

 the philosophical mind, a legitimate and fruitful 

 subject for satire is obvious, yet not for the rea- 

 sons imagined by Mr. Mallock. As a practical 

 man " conquering Nature " (as Bacon says) " by 

 obeying her," so far from being absurd he is 

 almost sublime. It is when he ranges himself 

 among philosophers that he becomes vulnerable. 



While the old-fashioned scientist was incited 

 to scientific inquiry by a sense of the mystery 

 enveloping the universe, the modern scientist 

 (owing to a combination of circumstances, upon 

 which there is no room here to enlarge) has 

 sprung from a class of thinkers to whom a sense 

 of mystery is absolutely foreign — a class whose 

 scientific inquiry is purely utilitarian, and who, 

 in days gone by, would have exhausted their 

 energies in affairs merely. "The reason," says 

 Aristotle, "why we have made this discourse is 

 that all men suppose that what is called wisdom 

 has reference to first causes and principles." 



Between him and the modern scientist the 

 difference is not one of mental structure merely, 

 but of temperament. The positivist's true kin- 

 ship is with practical men, and not with thinkers 

 at all. The danger of the positivist's method is 

 that in his desire to avoid (or rather in his in- 

 stinct for avoiding) teleological ignes falui he 

 settles down into "factology " — the principles of 

 which are that under the direction of the Royal 

 Institution the universe grew, and that "what- 

 ever is is right " if it accords with the suitable 

 section of the British Association. 



Feeling as we do that, in the conflict between 

 positivism and spiritualism, Mr. Mallock is on the 

 right side, we are sorry to have to speak so dis- 

 paragingly of his championship, and we are no 

 less provoked with him for driving us to do so. 



— The Athenaeum. 



