associate with your name. They are not mine. I have not discovered
or invented them. They are so obvious that any one who chooses may
see them; and I have been only moved to meddle with them, because,
from being so obvious, it seems that no one will so much as deign
to look at them, or at any rate to put them together with any care
or completeness. They might be before everybody's eyes; but instead
they are under everybody's feet. My occupation has been merely to
kneel in the mud, and to pick up the truths that are being trampled
into it, by a headstrong and uneducated generation.

With what success I have done this, it is not for me to judge. But
though I cannot be confident of the value of what I have done, I am
confident enough of the value of what I have tried to do. From a
literary point of view many faults may be found with me. There may
be faults yet deeper, to which possibly I shall have to plead
guilty. I may--I cannot tell--have unduly emphasized some points,
and not put enough emphasis on others. I may be convicted--nothing
is more likely--of many verbal inconsistencies. But let the
arguments I have done my best to embody be taken as a whole, and
they have a vitality that does not depend upon me; nor can they be
proved false, because my ignorance or weakness may here or there
have associated them with, or illustrated them by, a falsehood. I
am not myself conscious of any such falsehoods in my book; but if
such are pointed out to me, I shall do my best to correct them. If
what I have done prove not worth correction, others coming after me
will be preferred before me, and are sure before long to address
themselves successfully to the same task in which I perhaps have
failed. What indeed can we each of us look for but a large measure
of failure, especially when we are moving not with the tide but
against it--when the things we wrestle with are principalities and