In the rest, gentlemen, let us think, and let us observe. For if we
are ignorant, not merely of the results of experimental science, but
of the methods thereof, then we and the men of science shall have no
common ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands to each other.
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.
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