THEOET OF KISSING. 303 



emanating from a bad motive. Qzmz-scientific people men 

 and women who, having committed to memory a jargon of 

 scientific terms, mingle them with cloudy idealisms spiced 

 with Scotch metaphysics do not seem to understand, do not 

 seem to have the faculty of being able to understand, that in 

 matters of scientific investigation there is no such principle 

 recognised as concealment of a part of the truth for polite- 

 ness' sake for peace and quietness'' sake. The assumption, 

 not to say the proof, that such were done, would be hateful 

 to a philosopher. He thenceforth would regard with loath- 

 ing and contempt the individual who should so demean him- 

 self. Non-scientific people cannot be made to understand 

 this. All that seems to them like a whale must be very like 

 a whale in the testimony of everybody. 



To return to the baron : his experiments led him to con- 

 clude that the peculiar light which emanated from the poles 

 of magnets revealed the existence of a force hitherto unrecog- 

 nised ; in which particular even granting all his postulates 

 and preliminaries most philosophers would not feel called 

 upon to agree. He proved, or rather his young ladies proved, 

 that the light in question was a sort of flame resembling 

 ordinary flame, in the respect that it could be deflected by 

 a transverse current of air. This testimony, if borne out, 

 should have surely given hope that a more intimate acquaint- 

 ance by ordinary mortals with this extraordinary light would 

 be possible. That the magnetic flame should be impres- 

 sible by such a gross material thing as atmospheric air, would 

 seem to place it out of the category of very attenuated essences. 

 In the course of time, Baron Reichenbach proved to his own 

 satisfaction, that the light spoken of as emanating from 

 magnets did not emanate exclusively from them. He satisfied 

 himself that, though always accompanying magnetism, it 

 was distinct from magnetism ; and that it was in virtue of 

 the operation of the force, indicated by the manifestation of 

 the flame (he strenuously defended the hypothesis of a new 



