206 INTERNAL MEDICINE 



tives, are indispensable; for the rest we are tempted to surmise 

 that mankind might have been happier and better if Dioscoride.s 

 had been strangled in his cradle. 



This is the truth I have tried to get home to you, that in the 

 truncation of medicine the physician lost not only nor chiefly a 

 potent means of treatment; he lost thereby the inductive method: 

 he lost touch with things; he deprived his brains of the coopera- 

 tion of the subtlest machine in the world the human hand, a 

 machine which does far more than manufacture, which returns 

 its benefits on the maker with usury, blessing both him that takes 

 and him that gives. 



Pure thought, for its own sake, especially in early life, when the 

 temptation to it is strong and experience small, seems so disinter- 

 ested, so aloof from temptation of gain, that in the history of ideas, 

 speculation and the construction of speculative systems have played 

 but too great a part, and have occupied but too many minds of 

 eminent capacity. We must assume then that they have served 

 and for aught we know may still serve some good end. It 

 seems hardly likely that age after age men would busy themselves 

 to build up these vast constructions in idle exercise. That nature 

 is wasteful we know but too well; yet she is wasteful by the way, 

 not in the main direction of her work. If some of her seed falls on 

 stony ground, if her rain falls on the just and on the unjust, yet 

 the sowing and the rain are in the main fruitful and delightful. 

 Peradventure, in our modern conviction <Jf the efficiency of the 

 inductive method we may be too ready to denounce other methods 

 which, hard as it may be for us to conceive, may yet play some 

 lasting part in evolution. Even in our own day we may become 

 too analytical; on our good side we may be too exclusive. In the 

 pale hue even of inductive analysis may we not get sick, lose reso- 

 lution in too much deliberation, overlook the concrete, and forget 

 that if by any mode of generalization we lose hold of individuals 

 in types, and of things in the negations and eliminations of ab- 

 straction we may fall ourselves into the very error of the "school- 

 authors." If the search for entities was false, may there not be a 

 sort of imposition in "laws"? When in the last analysis we attain 

 to unresolved residua may we not err in giving even to a true resi- 

 duum too solid a name? Whether it be the summation of phe- 

 nomena or a vision of the imagination an abstraction is an abstrac- 

 tion, and abstractions carry us a long way from deeds and things. 



In the minds of academical teachers the notion still survives 

 that the theoretical or university form and the practical or tech- 

 nical form of a profession or trade may not only be regarded sepa- 

 rately, and taught in some distinction, which may be true, but 

 in independence of each other; nay, that the intrusion of the tech- 



