THE PARADOX OF DIDEROT. 539 



success. Billiard balls and other small articles have been made 

 of celluloid, a combination of gun cotton, camphor, and ivory 

 dust, but none have been satisfactory to the workman, whether 

 carver, turner, or miniature painter. 



There are not less than fourteen extinct but only two or three 

 living species of elephants. Like the American buffalo, they are 

 becoming less numerous every year. Though long-lived some 

 have in captivity lived over one hundred and fifty years they 

 propagate very slowly, the most slowly of any known animal; 

 the period of gestation is twenty-two months, and but one at a 

 birth, and they are gradually disappearing before the hunter. 

 One writer states that England's imports of African ivory alone 

 average in one year 15,550 hundredweight, worth from 600,000 

 to 750,000, or between three and four million dollars, and pre- 

 dicts the certain decrease of supply and consequent increase of 

 value of ivory. 



THE PARADOX OF DIDEROT. 



BY M. ALFRED BINET. 



HAVING had occasion several years ago to converse on sub- 

 jects of psychology with a number of comedians, I sought 

 their opinion concerning the " paradox of Diderot," and, finding 

 much in their answers that was instructive, I took them down. 

 I afterward completed the inquiry by questioning several of the 

 actors connected with the Theatre Frangais. The subject had 

 been already studied by W. Archer (cited by William James in 

 his Psychology), but I was at the time ignorant of his work. So 

 far as I can judge, I reached the same conclusions as he. 



Diderot's Paradox of the Comedian is not a very profound 

 work, but deals in scattered facts of little intrinsic weight, and 

 his arguments are not very forcible. 



His thesis is that a great actor must not be sensitive ; or, in 

 other words, that he must not feel the emotions he expresses. 

 " Extreme sensitiveness makes poor actors ; while absolute lack 

 of sensitiveness is a quality of the highest acting." He sustains 

 this view by six arguments, viz. : we can not repeat emotion at 

 will, but the power is soon exhausted ; the age when the come- 

 dian is at his greatest is not youth, when he is quick and full of 

 emotion, but after he has had a long experience, when the ardor 

 of his passions has subsided and his head is calm and his spirit 

 self-possessed; certain facts going to show that the performer's 

 real feelings are different from those which he is expressing on 

 the stage ; and, finally, his best argument, and the one on which 

 his thesis mainly rests, that one can not do two things at a time. 



