Mr. Fax was afraid that Mr. Mystic would treat them as Lord Peter treated his brothers; that he would put nothing on the table, and regale them with a dissertation on the _pure idea of absolute substance_; but in this he was agreeably disappointed; for the _anticipated cognition_ of a good dinner very soon smoked before them, in the _relation of determinate coexistence_; and the _objective phenomenon_ of some superexcellent Madeira quickly put the whole party in perfect good humour. It appeared, indeed, to have a diffusive quality of occult and mysterious virtue; for, with every glass they drank, the fog grew thin, till by the time they had taken off four bottles among them, it had totally disappeared. Mr. Mystic now prevailed on them to follow him to the library, where they found a blazing fire and a four-branched gas-lamp, shedding a much brighter radiance than that of the _synthetical torch_. He said he had been obliged to light this lamp, as it seemed they could not see by the usual illumination of Cimmerian Lodge. The brilliancy of the gas-lights he much disapproved; but he thought it would be very unbecoming in a transcendental philosopher to employ any other material for a purpose to which _smoke_ was applicable. Mr. Fax said he should have thought, on the contrary, that _ex fumo dare lucem_ would have been, of all things, the most repugnant to his principles; and Mr. Mystic replied that it had not struck him so before, but that Mr. Fax’s view of the subject ‘was exquisitely dusky and fuliginous’: this being his usual mode of expressing approbation, instead of the common phraseology of _bright thoughts_ and _luminous ideas_, which were equally abhorrent to him both in theory and practice. However, he said, there the light was, for their benefit, and not for his: and as other men’s light was his darkness, he should put on a pair of spectacles of smoked glass, which no one could see through but himself. Having put on his spectacles, he undrew a black curtain, discovered a _cylindrical mirror_, and placed a sphere before it with great solemnity. ‘This sphere,’ said he, ‘is an oblong spheroid in the perception of the cylindrical mirror: as long as the mirror thought that the object of his perception was the real external oblong spheroid, he was a mere _empirical philosopher_; but he has grown wiser since he has been in my library; and by reflecting very deeply on the degree in which the manner of his construction might influence the forms of his perception, has taken a very opaque and tenebricose view of how much of the spheroidical perception belongs to the _object_, which is the sphere, and how much to the _subject_, which is himself, in his quality of _cylindrical mirror_. He has thus discovered the difference between _objective_ and _subjective reality_: and this point of view is _transcendentalism_.’ ‘A very dusky and fuliginous speculation, indeed,’ said Mr. Fax, complimenting Mr. Mystic in his own phrase.