And yet the effect of this book is by no means wholly disagreeable. To be sure, in their constant assertions of the "impossibility" of any belief but their own being true, their honest narrowness may often be a little amusing. They seem like two eyeless fish in the recesses of the darkness of the Mammoth Cave talking to each other of the absurdity of believing in any sun or upper world. But they are so honest, so sincere, so much in love with Truth, and so free from any self-seeking, that we find it easy to sympathize with their naïve sense of discovery, as they go sounding on their dim and perilous way. Only we cannot but think what a disappointment it must be to Harriet Martineau to find herself alive again in the other world. In her case, as Mr. Wentworth Higginson acutely remarks, we are deprived of the pleasure of sympathizing with her gladness at discovering her mistake, since another life will be to her a disagreeable as well as an unforeseen event. Nor is it extraordinary, to those who trace Harriet Martineau's intellectual history, that she should have fallen into these melancholy conclusions. In her childhood and youth, most of the Unitarians of England, followers of Priestley, adopted his philosophy of materialism and necessity. Priestley did not believe in a soul, but trusted for a future life to the resurrection of the body. He was also a firm believer in philosophical necessity. An active and logical mind like Miss Martineau's, destitute of the keenness and profundity which belonged to that of her brother James, might very naturally arrive at a disbelief in anything but matter and its phenomena. From ignorance of these facts, Mrs. Chapman expresses surprise that the inconsistency of Harriet Martineau's belief in necessity, with other parts of her Unitarianism, "should not have struck herself, her judges, or the denomination at large." It _would_ have been inconsistent with American Unitarianism, but it was not foreign from the views of English Unitarians at that time.