This is a book about the problem of insensibility in early modern natural philosophy and the many Jesuit thinkers who grappled with it. Through a series of case studies on ontology, demonology, magnetism and the occult, Mark A. Waddell presents a clear and ordered discourse on hidden causes, one that moves from using the preternatural as a flexible category facilitating analysis to deeming it irrelevant – a trajectory that, to risk oversimplifying Waddell's rich argument, one might term ‘from occult to artifice’. The centrepiece is two chapters on Athanasius Kircher, one on his museum and the other on his writings. They marry the famous polymath's collection of marvels to his writings, casting them in the light of the early modern problem of how to see or apprehend. Kircher has attracted attention of late, but his difficulty can be off-putting for non-specialists in the history of natural philosophy. Waddell argues that this difficulty was precisely the point: ‘The Kircherian collection acquainted audiences with uncertainty and exposed the fallibility of their senses even as it displayed a universe that was difficult, perhaps impossible to understand completely’ (p. 121). As it did for early modern audiences, for readers of Jesuit science Kircher's museum functions as an entry-point to the more arcane debates with which he and his colleagues appear to have been concerned. Magnetism and the occult, the subjects of Waddell's initial chapters, attain greater focus and clarity when presented in the context of the museum, finding their apogee in the denouement of display and subterranean concealment which ‘celebrated rather than exposed the insensible’ (p. 109). The progression that Waddell describes is convincing, but the self-contained nature of this discourse raises questions. These epistemic shifts might more broadly be described as a trend towards empiricism, one experienced by a great many scholars working outside the Society of Jesus, in many disciplines other than natural philosophy. The vitality of the Jesuit Society and its practical role in informing early modern knowledge processes through information networks, written observations and early modern textual experimentation are fresh subjects in the history of science, but their relationship to the intellectual history of treatises here remain tantalising. Kircher's museum links Waddell's work to ongoing scholarship in the history of collecting and the development of broader scientific cultures of curiosity, and by doing so raises the possibility of new kinds of work. For both the case that it makes and the questions that it raises, Jesuit science is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of natural philosophy.