When the intellectual lightships broke from their moorings ...

Well I have started my journey and begun Adam Bede. In the introduction, describing the life and times of George Eliot, Stephen Gill writes "Writing shortly after her death JA Froude spoke of the earlier part of the Victorian age, in which the spirit of critical inquiry had led the finest minds to question and doubt all established certainties, as a time in which 'all around us, the intellectual lightships had broken from their moorings ... The present generation which has grown up in an open spiritual ocean, which has got used to it and has learned to swim for itself, will never know what it was to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars'".

Those would certainly have been interesting times. But I wonder if even our generation has yet really learnt to swim for itself in that open spiritual ocean? It seems to me that while a few individuals are well-acquainted with the sea, and swim their steady way to somewhere (or anywhere), many are rather trying to fill up the ocean, with all manner of material things or pseudo-spiritual ideas of little consequence or scientific theories, so there is no need for swimming ...