swer that question? For myself,
as I lift up my eyes from my paper once more, my gaze falls first on the
golden bracken that waves joyously over the sandstone ridge without, and
then, within, on a little white shelf where lies the greatest book of
our greatest philosopher. I open it at random and consult its sortes.
What comfort and counsel has Herbert Spencer for those who venture to
see otherwise than the mass of their contemporaries?

"Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest
it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself
by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly
realise the fact that opinion is the agency through which character
adapts external arrangements to itself--that his opinion rightly forms
part of this agency--is a unit of force, constituting, with other such
units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will
perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost
conviction; leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for
nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and
repugnances to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and
beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember
that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future;
and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not
carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider
himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown
Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he
is thereby authorised to profess and act out that belief. For, to render
in their highest sense the words of the poet--

'Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.'

"Not as adventitious therefore will the wise man regard the faith which
is in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter; knowing
that, let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the
world--knowing that if he can effect the change he aims at--well: if
not--well also; though not SO well."

That passage comforts me. These, then, are my ideas. They may be right,
they may be wrong. But at least they are the sincere and personal
convictions of an honest man, warranted in him by that spirit of the
age, of which eac