MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MODERN THOUGHT. 345 



given form to a forefeeling of this higher development. But I will 

 not pursue this pregnant matter further now ; I have touched upon it 

 only for the purpose of illustrating the large scope of the medical 

 work of the future, which is to discover those laws which have heen 

 in operation through the past to make man the superior heing which 

 he is, and to determine his future action in intelligent conformity 

 with them ; not only to cure disease of body and mind, as it has 

 aimed to do in the past, and to prevent disease, as its larger aim now 

 is, but to carry on the development of his nature, moral, intellectual, 

 and physical, to its highest reach. 



So much, then, concerning the three topics on which I have pro- 

 posed to myself to discourse in this lecture namely, the nobility of 

 your direct function as healers of disease, the excellence of the method 

 of medical study as a means of intellectual and moral training, and 

 its fruitfulness in benefits to mankind, and the grandeur and the 

 reach of its aspirations for the future. Let me hope that I have, in 

 fulfillment of my design, said enough to satisfy you that you have 

 made a good choice of a profession for your life's work. Having 

 chosen, it remains only that you should justify your choice by your 

 work, so that it may be said of each of you, when his long day's task 

 is over and the night has come, that he was in his right position in 

 the world, and made a right good use of it. Life has its three stages 

 youth, manhood, and old age ; let it be your anxious care now, in 

 the first stage of joy and hope, so to pass the second stage of work 

 and duty that the last stage may not be a long regret. 



I will ask your indulgence only for a few minutes more, while I 

 detain you for one or two final reflections of what I may call an 

 inhibitory character. In pursuing resolutely the course of scientific 

 inquiry which I have indicated, it must needs be that offenses some- 

 times occur, for we can hardly fail to come into collision with some 

 of the prejudices and traditions of mankind. I do not know how it 

 is possible, for instance, to prosecute the physiological investigation 

 of mind to its farthest reach without shaking the foundations of the 

 metaphysical notions which have been held concerning it and its 

 functions ; and with the fall of these notions, long cherished of man- 

 kind, other notions that are bound up with them may totter to their 

 fall. But, if this must be, we shall do well to acknowledge it more 

 in sorrow than in anger. Let us not rush with eager fury and exult- 

 ant clamor to the work of destruction ; it behooves us, as products of 

 the past, who will one day ourselves constitute the past, to deal gen- 

 tly and even reverently with it. We cannot break with it if we 

 would, nor should we if we could. The very language which we use 

 we owe to the slow acquisitions of generations which have preceded 

 us ; we cannot compassionate or contemn them except in words for 

 which we are indebted to them. There is hardly a word I have used 

 in this lecture which, were its history searched out, does not mean 



