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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cacy of it by enforcing motives which will touch more keenly the 

 springs of human conduct than those which they present. Now let me 

 indicate very briefly, as must needs be, the method by which medical 

 science is to advance to take possession of this higher ground. 



Starting with the trite maxim that before we can act we must 

 learn, it is obvious that, before we can teach men to act with more 

 wisdom than they have done in the past, we must give them a better 

 knowledge of their own nature and relations than they have had. 

 This we propose to do by the patient and steadfast application of 

 the method of observation and induction, which has served us so well 

 in the subordinate branches of science, to the highest phenomena of 

 man's being his thoughts, feelings, and conduct. The problem is the 

 same here, in fact, as in the lower sciences to observe in order to 

 foresee, and to foresee in order to modify and direct ; and the method 

 is the same. Admitting, as I see not how we can help doing scien- 

 tifically, that a process of evolution has gone on in Nature, and that 

 man, as he now is, is a product of the past carrying on this process 

 in his progress to a higher purpose in the future, it is a natural con- 

 clusion that he must, as a part of Nature, be studied by the same 

 method as the rest of Nature. We have to search back and find out 

 how he came to be what he is by looking to the historical evolution 

 of the race from its earliest known conditions, and by tracing in the 

 development of the organism the operation of laws which we discover 

 at work under less complex conditions in the rest of Nature. When 

 we do that, we find the best reason to believe that the highest facul- 

 ties of his mind, his intellect, and his moral feelings, have not been 

 implanted ready-made in his nature at any period of its history, but 

 have been the slowly-won results of the accumulated experiences of 

 the race transmitted by hereditary action : that is the lesson which 

 observation and induction, applied to the investigation of the origin 

 and development of man's higher nature, teach with an authority 

 which cannot be gainsaid from any standpoint of positive knowledge. 

 I could have wished, had I had time, to have shown you how some 

 phenomena of mental disease, which may be looked upon in this rela- 

 tion as instructive expei'iments of Nature made for us in a domain 

 where we cannot make them for ourselves, confirm the induction 

 which has been reached by observation of human development, both 

 in the individual and in the race. But I must leave that unsaid, and 

 restrict myself to the conclusion as regards conduct which results 

 from the acknowledgment that the latest and best acquisitions of man 

 have come to him by a pi*ocess of ordinary development through the 

 ages. For the problem of to-day is truly no longer the schoolmen's 

 much-vexed question of the origin of evil, but the question of the 

 origin and growth of good. Our plain duty is to find out the laws 

 which have been at work in that process, and to continue it to carry 

 on, by deliberate method, with conscious purpose, the development 



