Warmed both hands before the fire of life;
and nothing is left me, before I depart, but to help, or at any rate to abstain from hindering, the younger generation of men of science in doing better service to the cause we have at heart than I have been able to render.
And yet, forsooth, I am supposed to be waiting for the signal of "revolt," which some fiery spirits among these young men are to raise before I dare express my real opinions concerning questions about which we older men had to fight, in the teeth of fierce public opposition and obloquy--of something which might almost justify even the grandiloquent epithet of a Reign of Terror--before our excellent successors had left school.
It would appear that the spirit of pseudo-science has impregnated even the imagination of the Duke of Argyll. The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
[21] The Duke of Argyll speaks of the recent date of the demonstration of the fallacy of the doctrine in question. "Recent" is a relative term, but I may mention that the question is fully discussed in my book on _Hume_; which, if I may believe my publishers, has been read by a good many people since it appeared in 1879. Moreover, I observe, from a note at page 89 of _The Reign of Law_, a work to which I shall have occasion to advert by and by, that the Duke of Argyll draws attention to the circumstance that, so long ago as 1866, the views which I hold on this subject were well known. The Duke, in fact, writing about this time, says, after quoting a phrase of mine: "The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to be simply a question of evidence." In science, we think that a teacher who ignores views which have been discussed _coram populo_ for twenty years, is hardly up to the mark.
[22] See also vol. i. p. 460. In the ninth edition (1853), published twenty-three years after the first. Lyell deprives even the most careless reader of any excuse for misunderstanding him: "So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth-crust is quite consistent with the admission of their alternate development and suspension for indefinite periods within limited geographical areas" (p. 187).