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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: that they were in the right--that they were fighting a battle for
which it was worth while to dare, and if need be to suffer, could
have enabled them to defy what was then public opinion, backed by
overwhelming physical force.
Their intellectual defects are patent. No one can deny that their
inductions were hasty and partial: but then they were inductions as
opposed to the dull pedantry of the schools, which rested on
tradition only half believed, or pretended to be believed. No one
can deny that their theories were too general and abstract; but then
they were theories as opposed to the no-theory of the Ancien Regime,
which was, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."
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