MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MODERN THOUGHT. 335 



and functions of the body, which is to be his ultimate special work. 

 Without the foundations of the prerequisite studies he will not be a 

 thoroughly well-grounded and cultivated physician, who may be re- 

 lied upon to perfect his knowledge by experience through life, al- 

 though he may no doubt be a fair practitioner in the routine which 

 he has been taught, or, if he devotes himself to surgery, skillful as a 

 mere operator. A knowledge of the simpler and more general sci- 

 ence is an essential prerequisite to the study of the more complex 

 and special science. Physics lie beneath chemistry ; in physics and in 

 chemistry we search for those intimate operations of matter which 

 lie at the foundation of physiology ; and physiology in its turn is 

 essential to the construction of the more complex science which is 

 concerned with man in his social relations that is, sociology. And 

 I may observe, by-the-way, that psychology, Avhich is an important 

 study for the man who has to put right the disorders of the minds 

 and bodies of his kind, demands not only a thorough knowledge of 

 physiology, but observation, also, of man in his social relations. 

 Each science rests upon the one below it, but reflecting the increasing 

 complexity of Nature as we rise from the movements of masses to 

 the movements of molecules of matter, and to the combinations and 

 relations of atoms, from dead again to living matter, from the sim- 

 plest forms of life to complex organisms, and from organisms to the 

 social union of organisms, contains in ascending scale something 

 more than the science below it something which constitutes its au- 

 tonomy as a science. Physiology being placed in this scale, as you 

 perceive, between chemistry and sociology, is on that account a most 

 instructive study at the present time, when chemistry has made great 

 progress toward scientific exactitude, and when the cultivation of 

 the new field of social science is just being entered upon ; there is no 

 science, in fact, which yields such rich promise of large discoveries 

 in the immediate future, and no science the discoveries of which, 

 when applied to human needs, will do so much to lessen physical suf- 

 fering. Fortunate are you, then, in the training which prepares you 

 for the study, and in the lot which at this particular era has fixed 

 your work in the pursuit, of a science which promises so great an 

 abundance of good fruit. 



One warning I would stop a moment here to urge. "While recog- 

 nizing the subordination of the sciences, we ought not to overlook 

 the fact that all the sciences are at bottom artificial divisions; that 

 the world is not divided rigorously into those different domains which 

 w r e call physics, chemistry, physiology, and the like ; that we make 

 the divisions for our convenience according to the complexity of the 

 phenomena, not because we discover them in Nature. Nature is one 

 and continuous, and takes not the least notice of the arbitrary divi- 

 sions which we find it necessary to make. It would seem a very ob- 

 vious distinction between plant and animal; and yet if we push our 



