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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: heroes the motives and modes of thought of his own day. The
present was to him the key to the explanation of the past, as it
was to the prediction of the future.
Now, as regards his attitude towards the supernatural he is at one
with modern science. We too know that, just as the primeval coal-
beds reveal to us the traces of rain-drops and other atmospheric
phenomena similar to those of our own day, so, in estimating the
history of the past, the introduction of no force must be allowed
whose workings we cannot observe among the phenomena around us. To
lay down canons of ultra-historical credibility for the explanation
of events which happen to have preceded us by a few thousand years,
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