APPENDIX.

“Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,How angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare.”

The genius and courage concerned in a particular discovery or reform it were impossible to estimate; there is no method of determining the specific gravity of such adventures: moreover we are now so well used to the lights, bells, and soundings of the routes of scientific enquiry that it is hard for us to realise the pain and peril of fogs and contrary winds in voyages where were no such guides. Indeed no exposition of defects of methods can explain false habits of thought without a careful estimate of historical causes also, in what we may call the embryology of thought; for at no time were right methods of thought wholly wanting, or even wholly disregarded. But, as we approach Harvey’s own time, if on the one hand I have shown that Europe until he came was not ready for him, on the other hand I trust I have made it more easy to conceive the weight of the socialsystems, opinions, and prejudices against which his gigantic effort was made. For, brilliant as was the promise of the Renascence, yet in the time of Harvey, and in the generation immediately before him, the decay of the scholastic methods and the worldliness of the Church, which in the first half of the sixteenth century had favoured the advance of secular culture, had led to a reaction, not against Luther only but also against all liberal learning and science. In the Vatican, in the Sorbonne, in the Consistory, and even in the courts of justice it was proclaimed that as these studies make government more difficult, it were ill to encourage them! We have seen that the Faith, though undermined and no longer catholic, was aroused, and was terrible still; orthodoxy was crushing free thought in Italy; Alva was in Flanders, and had been visited by Catherine de Medici at Bayonne; in France the ruthless religious wars ended in the triumph of Rome; Europe was overrun by Dominicans and Franciscans; Trent was long pregnant with anathema. Contrary sects alike defied liberal culture; and four years before Harvey’s birth the wolf, hidden under another cloak, had torn Servetus—Servetus who shared with Colombo the honour of preparing the way forthe founder of modern physiology. Even the genial conformist of the world, after his manner when he is scared, had turned brutal; he felt that the old conceptions upon which society was built for him, were suspected, and therewith society itself beginning to crack and split, yet he did not see that now by science only could society be recreated.

In Italy the Cinque Cento had taken its birth and nourishment chiefly from Latin sources and tradition. It regarded symmetry of form and rhetorical modes of passion; elegance was preferred to matter, and style to knowledge. Such a culture had not the seeds of life in it; in the middle of the sixteenth century its enthusiasms waned, its philosophy fell into routine, its style into mannerism; but science, not philosophy, not the Faith, was the heir of the Middle Ages. Science is not of Latin but of Greek inheritance, its sources are Greek; and with the westward swarm of the Greeks their older boons of eloquence and beauty were rivalled by their newer gifts of scholarship and natural knowledge. In France the leaders of this school were the Huguenots, the flower of the nation; in the Catholic reaction of the sixteenth century France scorched her own bloom,and Spain was blasted for ever. The humanists, who at best were false friends of science and medicine, were no longer powerful friends; their noble rage was suppressed by chill penury, and many of the most learned and zealous of them were vagabonds in Europe. Rhetoric, fine art, and even philosophy may flourish in slavery, learning and science can breathe no air but that of freedom; and freedom of learning was quenched in the blood of the Massacre of St Bartholomew. In 1540 had been founded the Society of Jesus, which then as now used science and learning, not as sources of truth or tests of conduct, but as tactics; putting on indeed the habit of the scholar, but only the more effectually to control research. Two years later the Spanish Inquisition was set up in Rome; and its shadow fell even over Venice, which abased itself to the imprisonment of Bruno. The great Venetian printers, some time reduced to the publications of decadent Averroism (p. 97), to avert bankruptcy had to print breviaries. Henry of Navarre, deserting Du Plessis Mornay, D’Aubigné, and De Thou, turned not only Roman Catholic but also ultramontane; and, if with his accession the Terror had ceased, social and political ostracisms, tests, and disabilities stifled all generous culture.

The great University of Paris, which throughout the Middle Ages had been the heart of Christendom, the centre of its life and heat, which in the fourteenth century was at its splendid culmination, and which had meddled with no feeble hand even in the State, was waning even in the fifteenth century, when France was devastated by war and rapine and her schools were emptied. This University, which had savagely condemned Joan of Arc, and sent Nicholas Midi to preach a solemn sermon at the stake, “pro Joannæ salutari admonitione et populi ædificatione,” in the sixteenth century came out of the religious wars stripped of its endowments, and deserted by its students; its curriculum was crassly conservative, its philosophy buckram, its theology a petrifaction; its forty colleges were closed, grass grew in its courts, and its public disputations were abased to the decorous apostasy of the freethinker. Montpellier was dominated by realism (vitalism). Francis Bacon had done better to have gone with Harvey to Padua; almost in the year of the publication of theDe motu cordis, the Parliament of Paris issued an edict that no teacher should promulgate anything contrary to the accepted doctrines of the ancients.

Such was the check which, after the death of Leo the Tenth, had befallen liberal studies: no Bembo now secretly protected freethinkers; in Central Europe the generous Maximilian the Second, who died in 1576 while counselling tolerance in religion to Henry the Third, was followed by reactionary emperors. In England no doubt the sky was clearer; in the Salamis of modern civilization the malign pretensions of Philip were shattered, and the “spacious times of Elizabeth” were glorious in their outburst of freedom, adventure, and culture, Medicine, however, sinking in the sixteenth century, fell, in the seventeenth, into that reproach which has become a byword. All superstition was not within the Faith. When Harvey’s discovery, like an earthquake, had broken up galenism and other outworn sophistries, his masterly work stood forth not only against long-winded dialectics on ars sphygmica, critical days, coctions, derivatives, revulsives, and like abstractions bequeathed by realism and uncritical subservience to texts, but also against a more lurid background of folk superstitions—of vampires, witch-burning, magic, cabbalism, astrology, alchemy, chiromancy, and water-casting. For medicine, says Bacon, is associated with charlatanry as Aesculapius withCirce. In physics, terrestrial and celestial, Galileo, persecuted as he was, had some current with him and before him; Copernicus had preceded him, Kepler was beside him: but in physiology the waters had closed upon the path of Galen as upon the wake of a great ship; the anatomists, themselves galenists, had given Harvey little help; and the share of Servetus76, Colombo, and Fabricius was but small in the discovery of the central fact of the science, and of the method which opened the way to Pecquet and Aselli, to Glisson, to Steno, to Wharton and Willis, to Haller and Bernard. Harvey’s discovery was the first step to a transfiguration of medicine; and though after Harvey there arose much false physiology and therewith again great floods of medical sophistry, yet from his time medicine has had to reckon with physiology, the only source of scientific nosology and therapeutics.

We celebrate the memory of great men in the certain hope that in their children they will be born again.

Besides those greater preventions which lay in the very structure and organised conceptions of society in the Middle Ages, the student of natural science was thwarted also by many lesser, which could not find place in this oration. Among the chief of these was judicial astrology, which supplanted and degraded the art of medicine.

It is difficult to carry the imagination into a time when the heavens were conceived as an animate and divine being77, the heavenly bodies as active and intelligent parts of it, and the whole set not in illimitable space but around man and his home, and waiting upon him (vid. p. 47); yet without such an effort we cannot realise the ancient place and dominion of astrology. Such a possession when in its strength must have enthralled the human mind; and it abode tenaciously with the first scientific conceptions of celestial phenomena, even in the thoughts of the enlightened. Tycho Brahe, for many years of his life, was an adept; and even Kepler sawportents in the skies. When we read the doctrines of Aristotle on the celestial beings, it is indeed somewhat strange that upon him, upon Plato, and upon the Ionians, the “judicia astrorum” had even less hold than the mythology: so truly poised, even in the infancy of science, were the cosmic speculations of this wonderful race. The Romans by their Etruscan tradition held to astrology, chiefly derived from Chaldea and Egypt, and by them it was mixed with grosser folk magic; yet even in Rome there were many to repudiate it, not only such Grecian spirits as Cicero but also such Romans as Juvenal; as in Harvey’s time it was assailed by the irony of Pascal and of La Fontaine. Even in the twelfth century John of Salisbury had not failed to turn his light artillery upon astrology.

This art of forecast naturally attached itself closely to that of medicine; and in its decrepitude still it clung to medicine like a parasite. And as parasites in the field of pathology, so astrology brought with it other noxious superstitions and follies even worse than itself. In England it survived till the witty attack of Swift killed Partridge and astrology together; yet to this day many of its notions are embedded in our common speech.

Ptolemy among his good services did one ill to mankind by hisTetrabiblonor “Quadripertit,” an astrological treatise which was current with the Almagest in the Western Schools. This authoritative treatise, together with the Aristotelian conception of the heavens, gave to astrology the aspect of a regular science with its own principles and methods; a science admired andeven courted by princes. As Frederick the Second and Charles the Fifth would learn of the stars the moment to take the field against their foes, so the medieval physician sought their countenance in the letting of blood or in the exhibition of a clyster or emetic. The Church, abhorring all concurrent dominion, and justly abhorring this bondage of the judgment of God and of the will of man, almost alone withstood the astrologer. If the doctors of theology did not know how to deny the power of the stars in the material cosmos, they vehemently denied it in the world of the spirit. “Et ideo pro certo tenendum est,” says Aquinas, “grave peccatum esse circa ea quæ a voluntate hominis dependent judiciis astrorum uti.” Of the priestly assailants of astrology, the most attractive to us for his wit, sagacity and sound knowledge, was Nicholas Oresme, sometime Bishop of Lisieux (died 1382), translator of theEthicsand other Aristotelian treatises, as he is portrayed for us by Hauréau (Dict. des Sciences philosophiques, art. Oresme) and M. Charles Jourdain. The fun of the thing is that the outspoken Oresme was the counsellor, the friend, and even the tutor of that notable astrologer Charles the Fifth; a story as honourable to the prince as to the subject. As Charles issued from the chambers of his astrologers the discourses of Oresme must have made him a little uncomfortable, especially when Oresme records the misfortunes of astrologising captains, such as Alphonso king of Castille, of whom, says he, I have heard nothing notable except that he cast horoscopes, was unfortunate in war, and neglectedhis kingdom; or such again as James the king of Majorca, a passionate astrologer, who on the dictation of the stars made a sortie against Peter of Aragon, and never came back again. It is all very well, says Oresme, for kings to know somewhat of the noble science of astronomy, but they must be content to hear of it in talk with sages, and not to spend upon the stars time and care which they should devote to the interests of their people. “Mesmement tele chose” (astrology, necromancy, geomancy and “quelconques tels ars”) est plus périlleuse à personnes d’estat, comme sont princes et seigneurs ausquelz appartient le gouvernement publique. Et pour ce ay je composé ce livret en françois afin que gens lais le puissent entendre, desquels, si comme j’ay entendu, plusieurs sont trop enclins à telles fatuités. Et autres fois ay je escript en latin de ceste matière” etc. In spite of the Bishop of Lisieux, astrology at the end of the fourteenth century reached the summit of its influence and popularity. In the course of his argument Oresme gives an admirable account of the nature of hallucination and the parts it may play in perverting knowledge; not only so but he explains also the fallibility of the normal senses in respect of organic defects, of media, of false inference, of association, of imposition of the imagination, and so forth. Under such circumstances, he says, a mystic might conceive himself to have been visited by an angel!

1To bring the oration within the time allotted, this portion, and the paragraphs on astrology added as an appendix, were omitted. For the same reason the paragraphs on scepticism (p. 82) were also omitted but by inadvertence have held their continuity in the text. It is customary to print the text as delivered; and this must be my excuse for the cumbrous apparatus of notes, much of which might have been taken into an enlarged text. The notes are necessary to fortify statements which orally may pass, but do not satisfy a reader.

2The “humoral doctrine” is imperfectly known. The fourelementsare earth, water, air, fire; the fourqualitiesare hot, cold, moist, dry; the fourhumoursare blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile. By permutation of these were obtained the endless elaborations of the galenist doctrine which for many centuries blinded Europe not to the truth only, but also to the clinical and physiological methods, example, and attainments of Galen himself.

3“Nec ullum satis validum imperium erat coercendis seditionibus populi, flagitia hominum ut cæremonias deum protegentis.” Tac. Ann.iii.60.

4It must not be supposed that the idealism of Plato and the mysticism of the East were alike, or even akin. Plato was a Greek; his mind, as we appreciate such qualities, was sane and lucid: he had no yearning whatever for absorption in the Infinite; but rather, like Aristotle, for a noble life.

5“Oftener on her knees than on her feetDied every day she lived.”Macbeth IV. 3.

“Oftener on her knees than on her feetDied every day she lived.”Macbeth IV. 3.

6I see in recent reports of Egyptian exploration that at Oxyrhynchus Plato was represented with curious persistence by the Phædo and the Laches; and these treatises appear in the early Fayyum papyri.

7A few axioms, collected from the physical and metaphysical treatises (perhaps by Cassiodorus from Boetius), were current from an early date. The translations of Boetius must for a time have lain in some neglect?

8Alcuin had but a translated abridgment or summary of the Categories, attributed to Augustine; and in a MS. of the tenth century we find no more than this. Boetius’ full translation of the Categories was not current till the end of this century, when all the logic of Aristotle was in the hands of the doctors. In the earlier Middle Ages, as in the writings of John of Salisbury and of William of Conches, we hear even more of Boetius than of the master himself. Virgil, Seneca and Cicero also were the sources of much of the culture of this period. Alcuin was a grammarian; he taught from Priscian and Donatus, improved the eighth century Latin, and probably made Virgil and Cicero known in Gaul and Britain. He knew but little Greek, as we infer from his quotation of the names of the Categories. Erigena knew more Greek and carried some of it to the Court of Charles the Bald. See note 2, p. 65. Alcuin probably did not visit Ireland. Boetius had translated also both Analytics and the Topics.

9Yet Roger Bacon seems to have apprehended both progress and the relativity of truth. Before Newman, he declared that God makes no full revelation but gives it in instalments; and in another passage he speaks of the judgments of Aristotle, and of other great teachers, “secundum possibilitatem sui temporis ... aliud tempus fuit tunc, et aliud nunc est”—a remarkable saying. Of the Saints he says “they had their time, we have our own.” Vid. also note, p. 80.

10Modern French historians do us the honour of annexing our heroes; in respect of the scholars of the Middle Ages M. Charles Jourdain has set, or followed, this example. John of Salisbury, that charming child of renascence, born out of due time, was first claimed as a Frenchman; then, as this “provenance” becomes untenable, he, and others, are called “Anglo-French.” The University of Paris in the XIIth century was no more France than Rome was Italy. In our sedentary arable life we do not realise the nomad habits of our forefathers. Edward the First would inhabit six distant castles in less than as many weeks; indeed Great Britain itself was then no island. The heroes, nay the armies, of Froissart’s Story fly about the world in their seasons like migrating birds. All keen scholars of the West went to the University of Paris, the daughter of kings and popes, and the intellectual centre not of a strip of kingdom between Anjou and the Empire, but of Europe itself. And of the scholars of Paris, Englishmen were, we hear, the most turbulent, but the boldest in argument and the most greedy of learning; this last character perhaps it is that now-a-days looks least English. Kuno Fischer admires the procession of great Englishmen down the highway of medieval thought, from Erigena to Francis Bacon. John was born at Salisbury, spent thirteen of his early years at the University of Paris, the best of them in the stormy service of Thomas Becket, and but the last five as Bishop of Chartres. We do not call Lanfranc an Englishman, nor even Adrian the Fourth an Italian.

11The name Realism has been improperly used—improperly because previously engaged—to signify the conception of an objective world, from the play of which our impressions arise, and of which our impressions are, if not likenesses, at any rate symbols, as opposed to the name “Idealism” which, with a like violence, has been turned to signify the conception that the universe of things is but a picture produced by the evolution of the phenomena of consciousness. The proper names for these opposite conceptions are of course Noumenalism and Phenomenalism. Realism proper as a habit of thought, whatever may have been its provisional uses, is now a mischievous habit; noumenalism is a harmless amusement.

12Roscellinus, the Roger Bacon of the eleventh century, learned, rebellious, lucid and heroic, withstood the Church for philosophy as did Bacon in the thirteenth for natural science. It would seem that in heroism at any rate Abélard was below his master.

13Vid. p. 50.

14The opponents of the theory of the Mass are apt to charge the Roman Church with the proposition that therein the elements are changed into “real” flesh and blood. In the nineteenth century, as in the thirteenth, this Church has not, I believe, determined whether the “real” substance be corporeal or incorporeal, separable or inseparable from the sensible properties of things; whether in a word it be something or, as many of us would say, nothing at all. Spinoza regarded “substance” as intelligent and extended.

15Thus it was difficult to claim his authority for one side or the other. The metaphysical treatises were not known till the later part of the twelfth century. (See p. 75, note 2.) At the outset of the Physics Aristotle discusses what nature is in itself, and defines first elements; in the Second Analytics on the other hand, although thinking of science as deductive and expository, he strongly opposes the primary existence of ideas, though these are predicable of many individuals. By excess of logical formations, the division of properties, the use of such terms as “γένη ὑποκείμενα,” &c. &c., he laid himself open to misconception, and so was readily platonised by his commentators. It would seem indeed that for Aristotle universals were not merely propositions obtained by negation of individual variations, but something more active. A νόησις became somehow a ποίησις; e.g. “ἡ δημιουργήσασα φύσις.” His position may be appreciated briefly thus:—In the Categories Aristotle speaks of individuals as primarily existent, while in Met.z, and elsewhere, the primary existent is the form. The inconsistency is, however, more apparent than real; for in the Categories it is the individual so far as he represents his natural kind which is primarily existent, whilst the form which in the Metaphysics is primarily existent occurs only in the individual. This terse appreciation is one of my many debts to Dr Jackson.

16It were almost to be desired, for our own lucidity, that we could get rid of the words cause and law, and use language significant of order only. Aristotle’s influence has weighed heavily in favour of studying “Causes” rather than sequences; thus it is hard to clear our own minds, and impossible to clear the minds of our pupils, of a genetic notion of causation—that an effect comes, as it were, from the womb of its causes. Even Ockham taught as if causes contained their effects. Mr Marshall (West. Rev. loc. cit.) is of opinion that Roger Bacon by his “non oportet causas investigare” intended to confine scientific thought to the relations of phenomena.

17As St Anselm put it, “Participatione speciei plures homines sunt unus homo.” Out of humanity individual men proceed.

18Vid. p. 32, note.

19Erigena, “the miracle of the Holy Ghost”; a figure of almost mythical grandeur, arising in the far west, full of new learning, of lyric enthusiasm, and heroic courage. He did not protest, with St Columba, against the Papacy only; he protested against authority, and he protested against mighty ignorance; neither of which should withstand the persuasion of right reason. “Ratio immutabilis ... quæ ... nullius auctoritatis adstipulatione roborari indiget.” His works were proscribed and burned.

20The one, to which alone Parmenides and Melissus attributed existence, was a material although an incorporeal unity. We must beware of accepting “matter” in the current dualist sense; for Aristotle himself ὕλη was hardly distinguishable from δύναμις.

21With every allowance for the phases of church and school in successive academical generations it seems strange that in 1209 Aristotle should have been forbidden under excommunication, and in 1231 restored to such favour that for the disciples of Albert and St Thomas the master almost attained the authority of a father of the church; the explanation probably is that “Aristotle” meant for a time the paynim interpretations of Toledo, particularly of the Physics (the Metaphysics were not translated from the Greek till about 1220); and meant not this only, but also liberal quotation and incorporation of the writings of Arab philosophers. To show how learning, even in the University of Paris, lay under ecclesiastical control, some extracts from the Edicts of the Synod of Paris and of Gregory the Ninth may be cited in illustration:—After directing that “Corpus magistri Amaurici extrahatur e cimiterio, et projiciatur in terram non benedictam” the Synod farther orders that the “Quaternuli [“Quaternuli” is translated by Ducange, Quatuor quartæ chartæ, seu octo folia: i.e. the octavos] magistri David de Dinant, ... afferantur et comburantur; nec libri Aristotelis de naturali philosophia, nec Commenta legantur Parisiis, publice vel secreto. Et hoc sub pœna excommunicationis inhibemus.... De libris theologicis scriptis in romano, præcipimus quod episcopis diocesanis tradantur, et Credo in Deum et Pater noster in romano, præter vitas sanctorum.” The order two years later confirming these prohibitions differs but in form. Even the Bull of Gregory in 1231, relieving the schools of this proscription, says, “Ad hæc jubemus ut magistri artium unam lectionem de Prisciano et unam post aliam ordinarie semper legant, et libris illis naturalibus, qui in concilio provinciali ex certa causa prohibiti fuere, Parisiis non utantur, quousque examinati fuerint, et ab omni errorum suspicione purgati.” The pope adds paternally, “Magistri vero et scholares theologiæ, in facultate quam profitentur, se studeant laudabiliter exercere, nec philosophos se ostendant, sed satagant fieri theodocti: nec loquantur in lingua populi, et populi linguam hebræam cum azotica confundentes” [azotica or arethica means the profane tongue (Ducange); Hebrew being a Sancta lingua]. The pantheistic outburst of the later twelfth century, although deriving in part from Erigena, was probably fed by the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias. This commentary was widely read in Arabic and Arab-latin translations, the latter of which were made, as we know (v. A. Jourdain, p. 123 and seq.), by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187). Alexander’s more material interpretation of ὕλη involved the return of All into God; hence no resurrection, no future life. In his followers these doctrines become grosser and grosser, and, fused with other Arabian doctrine, prepared for and afterwards strengthened the Averroism of Padua, in thexv-xvith century, in which system it was taught that the universal soul, dipping for the time into the individual man, is at death resumed into the universal soul. This virtual denial of personal immortality was of course bitterly resented by the Church. (Vid. p. 68, note.) Thus from the thirteenth century onwards pantheistic infidelity survived and even defied the menaces and the punishments of the Church.

22Both Albert and Aquinas were inconsistent. Hauréau points out that St Thomas was a vitalist in physics, an animist in metaphysics, a nominalist in philosophy, and a realist in theology. “Il a cherché à reconcilier des morts (i.e. Plato and Aristotle) qui, toute leur vie, se sont contredits.” But even sceptics contradict themselves; and it is fair to add that St Thomas pushed universals back to immanence in the Divine mind. For Plato the ideas are thoughts of universal mind; for Aristotle God, or Nature by its thoughts or plans determines the lines of phenomena: thus Plato and Aristotle were more alike than Thomas knew, or Hauréau admits. There was no such thing of course as The Scholastic Philosophy, of which I read again but the other day in a modern work. Scholasticism is the very various teaching of the schools of thexi-xvth centuries; though its general tendency was to search rather into the origin and nature than into the functions of being. The philosophy of the thirteenth century on the whole was eclectic;—though perhaps eclectic by confusion rather than by reconciliation. The rule of authority prevented an appreciation of the relative values of opinions; the recognised authorities were equally true, and had to be dovetailed together somehow. Critical interpretation had not begun.

23The objection should not lie against hair splitting, for thought cannot be too penetrating; but against the splitting of imaginary hairs.

24M. Charles Jourdain thus describes the procession of Rector, doctors and disciples of the University of Paris at the beginning of the fourteenth century. At the end of this century its decay began.

25For Aristotle the principle of individuation was matter and form (vid. note, p. 33); for Averroes it was form; for St Thomas it was matter. For all “vitalists” the identity of form, soul and life is essential; thus Stahl regarded soul as bestowing on body all activity, as determining all vital functions. In Aristotle ψυχή is untranslatable = anima and animus—soul and vital principle. Πνεῦμα again in various writers may mean anything, from air to spirit or other essence; cf. Arist. De Generat. An.ii.3, and the “aura” of Harvey, and even of Haller in the same connexion as the fertilising element.

26Not for all, not for the greatest of them! Aristotle, in vain, warned later generations against prophesying what seems likely, instead of looking to see how things come about:—“οὐκ ἀληθῆ λέγοντες, ἀλλὰ μαντευόμενοι τὸ συμβησόμενον ἐκ τῶν εἰκότων, καὶ προσλαμβάνοντες ὡς οὕτως ἔχον πρὶν γινόμενον οὕτως ἰδεῖν.” (De Gen. Anim. IV. i.) “Croire tout ce qu’on rêve,” if useful and possibly admirable in its day, in “neo-Hegelians” is a little stale.

27Thus, in ascending from general to more general, in the most general will be sought unique and perfect being; the primary cause and sole object of science—the αὐτοζῷον of the Alexandrians: whereas by successive eliminations utter abstractions would become utter vacuity. To such realists all subordinate beings are integral parts of the primary being. It would serve no useful end here to analyse these doctrines, or to indicate the pythagorean or stoical elements of them; for platonists and realists had their schools and degrees of subtlety; and Plato himself was inconsistent. Some brought secondary agents—demiurges or angels—into more creative activity, others carried creative reason back to the ideal good, and so on.

28Held by Gilbert, and attributed to Averroes; but older than Averroes. In turning to Francis Bacon’s hypothesis I read (Ed. E. and S.ii.263. Hist. Densi et rari—chapter, “Dilatationes per spiritum innatum se expandentem,” a Paracelsian sort of chapter) “Pulsus cordis et arteriarum in animalibus fit per irrequietam dilatationem spirituum, et receptum ipsorum, per vices.” The muscular quality of the heart was known to Galen, forgotten, and rediscovered. Spiritus vitalis, for Bacon, was “aura composita ex flamma et aere” (cf. Æn.vi.747). Glisson has been fortunate in two generous judges, in Haller and Virchow; it would ill become me to depreciate a distinguished Fellow of my own College, and as a clinical observer Glisson had considerable merits; but as a physiologist he was sunk in realism. He was happy in the invention of the technical term “irritability,” but for him this virtue was as metaphysical an essence as the vital spirit; his prime motor was not physical. As a philosopher I fear the independent reader of his works will find him fanciful and wearisome.

29Herein Harvey’s sagacity brought him towards the truth. “Air,” he says in theDe generatione, “is given neither for the cooling nor the nutrition of animals ... it is as if heat were rather enkindled within the fœtus (at birth) than repressed by the influence of the air.” Boyle (who says that he worked under the influence of Harvey’s discoveries) carried this matter forward by most interesting and sagacious experiments with his air-pump. For the layman, I may add that (to speak generally) before Harvey’s time respiration was regarded not as a means of combustion but of refrigeration. How man became such a fiery dragon was the puzzle!

30Perfection was attributed, not only by medieval philosophers but also by Plato and Aristotle, to the circle. Circular movement was therefore the most perfect, and therefore again must be that of the planets. This is a good illustration of the almost necessary tendency in the earlier excursions of thought to equate incoordinates, and to fill gaps in reasoning from alien sources.

31Not only movement but also formative activity. The ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως is the efficient cause of Aristotle; for him final causes direct motion—the οὗ ἕνεκα. Thus dialectic was taken for dynamics. Even Kant confused cause and effect with reason and consequence in hypothetical propositions (Benn). Caverni (Storia del methodo sperimentale in Italia, 1891-5) says that Jordanus Nemorarius (of Borgentreich near Warburg, d. 1236) made the great advance of extending the static physics of the ancients to establish dynamics; and that he introduced the word “moment.” In a cursory survey of the two works of Nemorarius which we have in Cambridge I have not been able to verify this statement; the notion I have found but not the word itself.

32Vid. p. 44, note 2.

33And Goethe:“Wie Himmelskräfte auf und nieder steigenUnd sich die goldnen Eimer reichen!Mit segenduftenden SchwingenVom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,Harmonisch all das All durchklingen.”Fausti.i. 1.In many of the older poets the same motive is found. Vaughan, a contemporary of Harvey, says:“And round beneath it Time in houres, dayes, yeares,Driven by the spheresLike a vast shadow moved.”The only celestial messenger who has discussed this matter with mankind was something of an obscurantist. Vid. Paradise Lost, Bk.viii.

33And Goethe:

“Wie Himmelskräfte auf und nieder steigenUnd sich die goldnen Eimer reichen!Mit segenduftenden SchwingenVom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,Harmonisch all das All durchklingen.”Fausti.i. 1.

In many of the older poets the same motive is found. Vaughan, a contemporary of Harvey, says:

“And round beneath it Time in houres, dayes, yeares,Driven by the spheresLike a vast shadow moved.”

The only celestial messenger who has discussed this matter with mankind was something of an obscurantist. Vid. Paradise Lost, Bk.viii.

34The word “philosophy” in the Middle Ages signified the pursuit of knowledge of things human and divine, and of the causes of them. It was often divided into Physics, Ethics and Logic. Cicero, to some of whose writings I have referred as then popular, says (in many passages, e.g. in the Acad. I. and II.) that philosophy “Prima rerum naturam scrutatur, secunda animum componit, tertia bene disserendi rationem docet.”

35Vid. note, p. 77.

36The judicious reader will remember in the Letters to Martinus Scriblerus the “familiar instance” of the jack. “In every roasting jack there is a meatroasting quality which neither resides in the fly, nor in the weight, nor in any particular wheel of the jack...but is inherent in the jack....As sensation, reasoning, volition &c. are the several modes of thinking, so roasting of beef, roasting of mutton, roasting of pullets, geese, turkeys &c. are the several modes of meatroasting....And as the general quality of meatroasting, with its several modifications as to beef, mutton, pullets &c. does not inhere in any part of the jack, so neither does consciousness” &c. &c.

37Or indeed he shrank from them, as the continual exclusion of divine interference seemed to him a starvation of moral growth. Vid. Phædo, 96, the interesting passage beginning “ἐγὼ γὰρ νέος ὢν Θαυμαστῶς ὡς ἐπεθύμησα ταύτης τῆς σοφίας ἣν δὴ καλοῦσι περὶ φύσεως ἱστορίαν κ.τ.λ.”

38The encyclopedic method, followed by Francis Bacon, and perpetuated even in the nineteenth century by some German metaphysicians, was not the mere collection of matter from any or all quarters, after the manner of Pliny; nor again mere omniscience; but was the demonstration of a cosmical theory from all departments of knowledge. When knowledge was a theological philosophy theologians were bound to supply thinking men with “Summæ,” or comprehensive applications and casuistries of it. Hugo of St Victor (d. 1141) and Robert Pullen (d. 1150) were the first scholastic Summists.

39Aristotle made many experiments, but experiments are not necessarily verification; and for the most part his were not. It is not experiment which makes science but the experimental method. Dr Payne, in the Harveian Oration of 1896, reminded us that among the ancients the forerunner of Harvey in this method was Galen.

40Those who are curious in manners will observe that during the last few years the medievalising clergy in England have discarded that fair linen which in the elder clergy was the emblem and the example of cleanliness.

41“Nemo psychologus nisi prius physiologus,” said Johannes Müller.

42For example, one man, fixing his eyes on a sublime ideal of holiness, confesses on his knees that he is a miserable sinner; another, surveying men about him, repudiates this imputation: it is a matter of parallax.

43Boyle, Essays, 2nd Ed. 1669, p. 119. In his Edition of 1661 Boyle speaks of the discovery of Harvey “our English Democritus” (published 1628) as commonly accepted. Whereby, he says, other “very plausible and radicated opinions” (the old schemes of the circulation) ... “are generally grown out of request.”

44Haeser says (vol.ii.p. 433): “Einen sehr bedeutenden Aufschwung nahm die Chirurgie im Zeitalter Harvey’s bei den Engländern, unter denen bis dahin kein Wundarzt ersten Ranges aufgetreten war. Nach kurzer Zeit erlangten die englischen Chirurgen durch allgemeine Bildung, gründliche Kenntniss der Anatomie, und praktische Gelegenheit ein entschiedenes Uebergewicht über die bis dahin herrschende französische Schule.” Cf. also Daremberg, Hist. et Doct. vol.i.p. 281 et seq.

45In the Medical Magazine (May, June, July, August, and Sept. 1899) is an interesting essay by Mr D’Arcy Power, “How Surgery became a profession in London.” Mr Power tells us that a scheme for the unity of the medical profession in London was set on foot in 1423, when the surgeons were the more highly organised body. A “Rector of Medicine” was indeed elected (Master Gilbert Kymer). It is not known how long the conjoint faculty of medicine and surgery lasted in London; but unhappily for our profession it seems to have been dissolved in a very few years.

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