MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MODERN THOUGHT. 339 



But it is time to return to the direct line of my argument. From 

 what has gone before, it should appear at what an excellent place of 

 advantage the order of studies for the medical profession is adapted 

 to place you ; how wisely it is arranged to train the mind for sound 

 reflection upon those most complex phenomena of Nature with which 

 the medical man has to deal the phenomena of life in health and in 

 disease ; and how sadly wrong in theory and mischievous in practice 

 he is likely to be who neglects to lay well the foundations of his men- 

 tal training. If no practical result were to follow a medical education, 

 if it were not pursued, as it is, for the purposes of the medical art, I 

 believe that one who aspired to fit himself best to understand the 

 world in which he lives, and the men with whom he has to do, could 

 not do better than go through it ; for it would be an excellent founda- 

 tion on which to build afterward. The study of man cannot be under- 

 taken with any satisfaction, or carried out with any completeness, 

 except through a previous study of the nature of which he is the 

 present culmination ; it is certainly not possible to enter the chamber 

 of the mind without passing through the antechamber of the body ; 

 and we cannot understand the body unless we understand a good deal 

 of the processes and laws of Nature which lie beneath biology. So 

 far, then, Mr. Lowe appears to be right when he regrets, as he is in 

 the habit of doing, that he was taught so much classical knowledge 

 and no science when he was educated, and contrasts the disadvantages 

 under which he labored with the advantages which each student at a 

 middle-class school now enjoys. Newspaper critics think that he is 

 making jokes or firing off paradoxes, and would seemingly rather have 

 Mr. Lowe as he is than Mr. Lowe as he might or would have been ; 

 but I am disposed to think that Mr. Lowe's insight has enabled him 

 to see what his critics quite fail to see that the statesman who has 

 to deal with the relations of men to one another in the world would 

 be better qualified for his work if he had a good fundamental knowl- 

 edge of the laws of man's nature and constitution, and of the laws of 

 the world in which he lives. The scientific statesman when we get 

 him will hardly deem it his highest achievement to shrink scared 

 from the grasp of a principle, or his supreme privilege and merit to 

 wait patiently to catch the fitful gusts of an ignorant public opinion. 

 The application of the principle which I have been enforcing, of 

 learning to know man through Nature, the thorough knowledge of his 

 environment, and of those of his relations to it which constitute his 

 life, must clearly be the foundation of a scientific medicine. Here, as 

 elsewhere, prevision for the purposes of action is our aim ; we observe 

 and infer in order to foresee, and, foreseeing, to modify and direct ; 

 we conquer by obeying, gaining a knowledge of the phenomena of 

 living beings in order to make ourselves masters of them, just as by a 

 knowledge of physics and chemistry we gain a mastery over the phe- 

 nomena of physical Nature. It is impossible to treat a 6ick person, 



