‘Implicit fiddlesticks! Did you ever read the Novum Organum? Mellot told me that you were a geologist.’
‘Well?’
‘You took for granted what you read in geological books, and went to the mine and the quarry afterwards, to verify it in practice; and according as you found fact correspond to theory, you retained or rejected. Was that implicit faith, or common sense, common humility, and sound induction?’
‘Sound induction, at least.’
‘Then go now, and do likewise. Believe that the learned, wise, and good, for 1800 years, may possibly have found out somewhat, or have been taught somewhat, on this matter, and test their theory by practice. If a theory on such a point is worth anything at all, it is omnipotent and all-explaining. If it will not work, of course there is no use keeping it a moment. Perhaps it will work. I say it will.’
‘But I shall not work it; I still dread my own spectacles. I dare not trust myself alone to verify a theory of Murchison’s or Lyell’s. How dare I trust myself in this?’
‘Then do not trust yourself alone: come and see what others are doing. Come, and become a member of a body which is verifying, by united action, those universal and eternal truths, which are too great for the grasp of any one time-ridden individual. Not that we claim the gift of infallibility, any more than I do that of perfect utterance of the little which we do know.’
‘Then what do you promise me in asking me to go with you?’
‘Practical proof that these my words are true,—practical proof that they can make a nation all that England might be and is not,—the sight of what a people might become who, knowing thus far, do what they know. We believe no more than you, but we believe it. Come and see!—and yet you will not see; facts, and the reasons of them, will be as impalpable to you there as here, unless you can again obey your Novum Organum.’
‘How then?’