PARADOXICAL PHILOSOPHY. 757 



regard themselves as thinking, taking care, all the while, that no actual thought 

 shall disturb their enjoyment of the luxury of extravagant opinion. The 

 members of the Paradoxical Society, with their guest, Dr Hermann Stoffkraft, 

 are far too earnest to adopt this pose of mind, but they exhibit that sympathy 

 in fundamentals overlaid with variety in opinions which is one of the main 

 conditions of good-fellowship. Dr Stoffkraft, in spite of his name and of his 

 office as the single-handed opponent of the thesis of the book, makes it his 

 chief care so to brandish his materialistic weapons as not to hurt the feelings 

 of his friends ; and when, near the end of the book, he gets a little out of 

 temper, it is about matters with which a materialist, as such, has no concern. 



As the book is not a novel there is no literary reason for not telling 

 " what became of the Doctor," as narrated in the last chapter. He goes to 

 Strathkelpie Castle to take part in an investigation of spiritualistic phenomena. 

 He begins by detecting the mode in which one young lady performs her spirit- 

 rapping, but forthwith falls into an " electro-biological " courtship of another, 

 and, this proving successful, he is persuaded by his wife and her priest to 

 renounce the black arts in the lump as works of the foul fiend ; and then 

 we are told that, having quieted his spirit by a few evolutions in four 

 dimensions, he has now settled down to compose his Exposition of the Relations 

 between Religion and Science, which he intends to be a thoroughly matured 

 production. 



The Doctor and, indeed, most of the other characters are no mere 

 materialised spirits, or opinions labelled with names of the Euphranor and 

 Alciphron type. They do not reduce their subject to a caput mortuum by an 

 exhaustive treatment, but take care, like well-bred people, to drop it and pass 

 on to another before we have time to suspect that the last word has been 

 said. 



We cannot accuse the authors of leading us through the mazy paths of 

 science only to entrap us into some peculiar form of theological belief. On the 

 contrary, they avail themselves of the general interest in theological dogmas 

 to imbue their readers at unawares with the newest doctrines of science. There 

 must be many who would never have heard of Carnot's reversible engine, if 

 they had not been led through its cycle of operations while endeavouring to 

 explore the Unseen Universe. No book containing so much thoroughly scientific 

 matter would have passed through seven editions in so short a time without 

 the allurement of some more human interest. 



