MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MODERN THOUGHT. 337 



the body's development, but afterward, having no longer any func- 

 tion, undergo atrophy. Moreover, men have not only shirked positive 

 inquiry from indolence, but have hated it from hostility. They dread 

 the thought of being shown to be one with Nature, and repudiate 

 with abhorrence the suggestion that their bodies and minds will ever 

 receive scientific explanation ; as if their bodies and minds would be 

 degraded to something quite different from what they are by being 

 understood like other natural phenomena and described in terms of 

 scientific thought. The supposition strikes them as something like a 

 blasphemy against the nobility of their nature. Hence there is a 

 deep-rooted instinctive hostility to the science that has to do with 

 man, which you will have to take account of in your careers an hos- 

 tility whicii has found partial expression, I think, in the anti-vivisec- 

 tion agitation. There was more in the fierceness of that agitation 

 than a laudable feeling of compassion for the animals an intensity 

 of acridity betraying another origin. There was the energy of fear 

 and hatred fear and hatred of the science which threatens the de- 

 thronement of man from the pedestal of conceit upon which he has 

 placed himself, and the destruction of some of his traditional beliefs. 

 But a little reflection might serve to prove to those who are moved 

 by these hostile apprehensions that they are possessed with an unrea- 

 soning fear, and are disquieting themselves in vain. Let them look 

 beyond the dark circle of their self-love, and they will see that what 

 is good in old creeds does not peri'sh ; that, although old forms vanish, 

 as generations and nations pass away, that in them which gave life to 

 them does not pass away, but puts on new forms and survives, as new 

 generations and nations follow and carry onward the work of progress. 

 Better would it be for them to seek for and foster the good which 

 survives than to lament and defend the old which is corrupt. 



Certainly science has not been careful to avoid occasions of offense 

 in its progress, and of its method and pretensions its votaries have 

 sometimes written in a strain which justly provokes scorn. While 

 proclaiming, then, the praises of observation and induction, and en- 

 forcing the value of a mental training which is obtained by studying 

 Nature after that method, let me interpose a few words of qualifica- 

 tion, in order that I may not be misunderstood. I cannot help feeling 

 that a great deal of questionable doctrine has been propounded con- 

 cerning the so-called method of induction which science is enjoined 

 rigidly to pursue, and that Bacon would have been aghast had he seen, 

 the absurdity which some persons in these days describe as his method,, 

 and the imbecile procedures of some of those who believe that they 

 are following it. They talk, in fact, of the method of observation 

 and induction as if it were something to conjure by; a mechanical, 

 process of knowledge-getting which rendered superior mental capacity 

 unnecessary ; a sort of intellectual ladder by which the most stupid 

 beings, if they only planted it properly, might mount up into the 

 VOL. x. 22 



