But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too high-minded to care for popularity themselves.
True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that “Sensationalism” which has sprung from nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges; and Realism, and we who own the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother’s love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the “Emotions and the Will” (Second Edition, pp. 78, 79), then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.
Only wait; and fret not yourselves, else shall you be moved to do evil. Remember the saying of the wise man: “Go not after the world. She turns on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough she will turn round to thee.”
Footnotes:
[{0}] The Macmillan and Co. book from which this eBook was transcribed (“Scientific Lectures and Essays”) also contains “Town Geology”. However, as Charles Kingsley published that as a separate book it is not included here. It is available from Project Gutenberg. - DP.
[{1}] An Address given to the Scientific Society of Winchester, 1871.
[{181}] A Lecture delivered to the Officers of the Royal Artillery, Woolwich, 1872.
[{201}] A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.
[{223}] For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African Negros, see Burton’s “Lake Regions of Central Africa,” vol. ii. pp. 341-60.
[{229}] A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution.