208 INTERNAL MEDICINE 



helm, it is one rather of wind and wing; it consists not in a mere 

 obedience of hand to mind, but in some mutual implication, or gen- 

 erative conjugation of them. How these two forms of impulse 

 should live in each other, we see in the Fine Arts in the swift con- 

 federacy of hand and mind in Diirer, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, 

 Velasquez, Watteau, Reynolds. The infinite delicacy of educated 

 senses is almost more incredible than the compass of imagination. 

 When they unite in creation no shadow is too fleeting, no line too 

 exquisite for their common engagement and mutual reinforcement. 

 Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest craftsmen 

 perhaps the world has seen, were as skillful to invent a water-engine, 

 to anatomize a plant, or to make a stonecutter's saw, as to build 

 the dome of St. Peter above the clouds of Christendom. 



Solve the problem as hereafter we may, now we can take heed 

 at least that energy shall not accumulate about one pole or the 

 other. Our little children have a message to us if we would but 

 hearken to them. Every moment they are translating action into 

 thought and thought into action. Eye, ear, and hand are inces- 

 santly on the watch and in pursuit, gathering incessantly for the 

 mind and the forms of thought which as rapidly issue again in new 

 activities. If, as we mature, we gain the power of restraint, it is 

 not that we shall cease to act, that the mind shall depose the hand, 

 but that these variables shall issue in a richer and richer function. 

 If we forget the hands, that cunning loom which wove our minds, 

 if thrusting them into our pockets, we turn our eyes inwards, will 

 our minds still truly grow? That by virtue of the apposable thumb 

 monkey became man is no metaphor; in its measure it is sober 

 truth. For the last millennium too much thinking has been the 

 bane of our profession; we have actually made it a point of honor 

 to ignore the hands out of which we were fashioned, and in this 

 false honor to forget that the end of life is action, and that only 

 by action is action bred. While we profess to admire Bernard Palissy 

 or Jean Goujon, the medieval mason or the medieval goldsmith, 

 we act nevertheless as if fine arts only are honorable, and mechan- 

 ical arts servile; whereby we blind ourselves to the common laws 

 of growth, which, knowing not these distinctions, deal out barren- 

 ness to those who make them. We begin even with our children 

 to wean them from the life of imaginative eyes and of thoughtful 

 fingers; and instead of teaching them to rise from simple crafts 

 to practical crafts, to scientific crafts, or to lovely crafts, and thus 

 to pursue the mean of nature herself, we teach them the insolence 

 that, except in sports, the mind should drop the acquaintance of 

 the fingers. 



Shall we wonder then that in this generation bold men call Eng- 

 lish people stupid; all stupid save those few men of genius or rich 



