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ADDRESS TO MEDICAL STUDENTS. 63 



.liscovci-y to-day, which explores the laws of the highest organic life. 

 If I can point out a few of the common features which give a mceting- 

 o-round Avith you for one who is, like myself, a physician of the soul 

 for studies that bear on the riddles of our mental life and the largest 

 aims of moral education my essay will not he throY/n away. 



It is plain to all that the marked feature of our modern culture is 

 the enthusiastic study of Nature ; and the fact demands our impartial 

 thought. This change, even within the last thirty years, is a striking 

 one. It comes in part from the magnificence of the discoveries gained 

 in every part of natural inquiry. It comes again from the reaction of 

 the mind, after a time of overstrained ideal pursuits ; nor is it strange, 

 when the philosophy which began with noble thinkers had evaporated 

 at last into a misty pantheism, that we should ask a more robust 

 sense, and a positive knowledge. It is amusing to meet to-day those 

 who awhile ago were talking of the infinite soul in man, and are now 

 quite proud of their pedigree from a West-African ape. But I attrib- 

 ute this feature of our culture not merely to such reaction. It betok- 

 ens a solid growth in the method of inquiry. Although I distinguish 

 it from many of the theories which call themselves science, yet the 

 principle which begins with the study of facts, verifies them by sure 

 experiment, and rests in ascertained laws, is the key of all discovery. 

 Our modern intellect did not, indeed, originate it. Nor can I ever 

 admit that the great thinkers of the past have not done immeasurable 

 service in their spheres of knowledge ; rather, I claim that there is 

 not a single foundation truth, in regard to the mind or moral nature, 

 which was not known, even before a Plato or an Augustine. Our 

 philosophy does not give essential truth ; it only opens it in its clearer 

 relations. The fixed stars have shed the same light aforetime, although 

 the glasses of to-day have pierced into the nebulous fields. But it is 

 the peculiar character of natural science, and the grandeur of its 

 mai'ch on this high-road, which have established, as never before, its 

 critical method. You are familiar with this in the wide range of in- 

 ductive study. The knowledge of the heavens is quite another thing 

 to us than in the day when Aristotle reasoned from the ideal perfect- 

 ness of the circle to the planetary motions ; and " made the world," 

 in Bacon's phrase, " out of his categories." Or, to illustrate from 

 your own field, the ancient theories of material and spiritual sub- 

 stance, which led to such fruitless speculation even to recent days, 

 have been exchanged for exact analysis. 



But this method is not confined to the interpretation of Nature; 

 it is the common law of advance in all knowledge. Mental science 

 must now begin with the related facts of biology and psychology, in 

 order to rise by clear analysis to the laws of thought or will. His- 

 tory obeys the same principle, and it has so passed, since the day of 

 Niebuhr, out of the cloud-land of legend to terra Jlrma. Our vast 

 researches into languasre have come from the dismissal of the old 



