Quote 7
In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained; the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses, which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue [...] with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers have not maintained for truth." (3.6.1)
The idealism of the scientific projectors mostly makes Gulliver laugh (or get annoyed), but he claims to feel "melancholy" at the high hopes of the Political Projectors for a more ethical government. Why does Gulliver's tone suddenly shift? What is the object of satire in this paragraph – still the Projectors themselves, or something else?