See, what gets me is that Smirke and Jonah’s merry band must have felt like such a hopeful endeavour at first. They were witnessing how scientific knowledge was reshaping society in real time (let’s not forget that they lived during the Industrial Revolution). Smirke’s ideas of balance, in that light, make perfect sense. I just wonder when it was that Jonah realised that there would be no answer to neatly organize his new world into happy little columns—and, consequently, when the initial attempts to stop the rituals became a race to complete his first.