WHAT IS INDIVIDUALISM? 207 



tion of experience, have worked out their individual conceptions 

 and revolutionized the course of an industry. I may be allowed 

 to quote one interesting example. In the days of the old Enfield 

 rifle, a large manufacturing firm in Birmingham used to make 

 the barrels of these rifles for the Government. The process was 

 in the main a simple one, the only difficulty being in securing that 

 the barrel should be absolutely straight and true. To secure this 

 latter point often occupied some time, but it was known that one 

 particular workman had some secret of his own, by which he was 

 enabled to glance down the barrel and say at once whether it was 

 perfectly true or not. The man was often pressed to reveal his secret, 

 but always declined. At last, one day for a drink and some two hun- 

 dred pounds he sold the mystery. It seems he had noticed the 

 simple fact that, when the tube was absolutely straight, no shadow 

 was formed on looking down it toward the light, but if the slightest 

 deflection existed a shadow was thrown on one or other wall of 

 the barrel. Our argument, then, so far as we have followed it 

 out, has brought us to three principal conclusions . firstly, that 

 every man, whatever his station in life, is endowed with a personal 

 equation of thought ; secondly, that he can either simply store the 

 raw material of facts and ideas as they are presented to him by 

 others, or he can digest them and reproduce them stamped with the 

 seal of his own individuality ; thirdly, that it rests with ourselves 

 either to be mere echoes of knowledge, or else "living voices" re- 

 cording our own gleanings of truth for the help of coming gen- 

 erations. 



Let us now apply these thoughts to the special region of medi- 

 cal education. In his Moral Philosophy, Prof. Stewart puts down 

 reverence for great names as one of the principal hindrances to 

 the spread of real knowledge ; I wish he had written " to the ac- 

 quirement of real knowledge," for I am firmly persuaded that no 

 student has reached the first stage of progress until he has sub- 

 ordinated reverence for great names to a profound respect for his 

 own individual opinion. Pray do not misunderstand me : I am 

 not advocating disrespect for our teachers, but I would rather a 

 student formed an erroneous diagnosis and stuck to it, provided 

 always he could give me his reasons for having formed such a judg- 

 ment, than that he should accept my dictum as a teacher without 

 challenging me for the grounds on which I ventured to differ 

 from him. A man has made a tremendous stride when he has 

 learned to have the courage of his own convictions. 



The directors of tlie Montsouris Observatory, Paris, have found that the 

 electrical disturbances produced by the passage of railway trains are a factor 

 that has to be taken account of in the record of their observations. Two railroads 

 pass close to the observatory, the trains of each of which produce peculiar and 

 somewhat different effects. 



