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 meets him. Granted that it comes to much the same in the end, for
it does not matter whether yea is called yea or nay, so long as it is understood
which it is to be; but our own more direct way of calling a spade a spade,
rather than a rake, with the intention that every one should understand it as a
spade, seems more satisfactory. On the other hand, the Erewhonian system lends
itself better to the suppression of that downrightness which it seems the
express aim of Erewhonian philosophy to discountenance.
    However this may be, the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease was fatal to
the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost every one at the Colleges
of Unreason had caught it to a greater or less degree. After a few years atrophy
of the opinions invariably supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to
everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with
which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was
repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of
them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No
cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease has yet been
discovered.
 
It was during my stay in the city of the Colleges of Unreason - a city whose
Erewhonian name is so cacophonous that I refrain from giving it - that I learned
the particulars of the revolution which had ended in the destruction of so many
of the mechanical inventions which were formerly in common use.
    Mr. Thims took me to the rooms of a gentleman who had a great reputation for
learning, but who was also, so Mr. Thims told me, rather a dangerous person,
inasmuch as he had attempted to introduce an adverb into the hypothetical
language. He had heard of my watch and been exceedingly anxious to see me, for
he was accounted the most learned antiquary in Erewhon on the subject of
mechanical lore