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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: If the thought be startling, do me the great honour of taking it
home, and verifying for yourselves its truth or its falsehood. I do
not say that it is altogether true. No proposition concerning human
things, stated so broadly, can be. But see for yourselves, whether
it is not at least more true than false; whether the ideas, the
discoveries, of which we boast most in the nineteenth century, are
not really due to the end of the eighteenth. Whether other men did
not labour, and we have only entered into their labours. Whether
our positivist spirit, our content with the collecting of facts, our
dread of vast theories, is not a symptom--wholesome, prudent,
modest, but still a symptom--of our consciousness that we are not as
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