In Michael Faraday's bicentennial year his ideas were described by a reviewer in Physics World as "apparently naive", whereas New Scientist pointed to "some evidence that...his intellectual capacities were just as strong as his practical ones". While I applaud these worthy efforts at putting the man in his place, I shall not join the critics. To me, Faraday remains the archetypal physicist, and if his explanations were naive, there are times when naive is good enough.