“Can you feel all evolution running through you? You look back, with gratitude to your parents and see how they stemmed from your grandparents, and beyond them the lineage starts to be lost in mist, but your reason knows that the weight of descent is immensely powerful even when your feeling cannot apprehend it; that, as Comte often put it, in humanity the dead are far more numerous than the living. You look forward to your children, and see how they distinguish themselves from you by revolt or by self-development, and wonder what kind of a world it will be when they are old, and whether it will be worse or better, and what problems they will find insoluble. By these acts of mingled reason and feeling you place yourself in the current of a stream of human development, and know a measure of helplessness, and imagine your children's helplessness, and yet are certain that you are not without free will, and hope that you will do what in you lies, for this entity so much greater than yourself.”
— Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, p. 256
