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.

FOOTNOTES: 

     [20] Nineteenth Century, March, 1887.

     [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).

     [23] A great many years ago (Presidential Address to the
          Geological Society, 1869) I ventured to indicate that
          which seemed to me to be the weak point, not in the
          fundamental principles of uniformitarianism, but in
          uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell.  It lay, to my
          mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a less degree by
          Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded