me every hospitality and
kindness; nevertheless I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some
of those whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their own
study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antitheses of the
Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians spent their
lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new thing, there were some
here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion
with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own
brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had once resorted,
none other was to attack it.

I should warn the reader, however, that I was rarely sure what the men
whom I met while staying with Mr. Thims really meant; for there was no
getting anything out of them if they scented even a suspicion that they
might be what they call "giving themselves away." As there is hardly any
subject on which this suspicion cannot arise, I found it difficult to get
definite opinions from any of them, except on such subjects as the
weather, eating and drinking, holiday excursions, or games of skill.

If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort, they
will commonly retail those of some one who has already written upon the
subject, and conclude by saying that though they quite admit that there
is an element of truth in what the writer has said, there are many points
on which they are unable to agree with him. Which these points were, I
invariably found myself unable to determine; indeed, it seemed to be
counted the perfection of scholarship and good breeding among them not to
have--much less to express--an opinion on any subject on which it might
prove later that they had been mistaken. The art of sitting gracefully
on a fence has never, I should think, been brought to greater perfection
than at the Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason.

Even when, wriggle as they may, they find themselves pinned down to some
expression of definite opinion, as often as not they will argue in
support of what they perfectly well know to be untrue. I repeatedly met
with reviews and articles even in their best journals, between the lines
of which I had little difficulty in detecting a sense exactly contrary to
the one ostensibly put forward. So well is this understood, that a man
must be a mere tyro in the arts of Erewhonian polite society, unless he
instinctively suspects a hidden "yea" in every "nay" that meet