RELATIONS OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY 207 



nical quality by materializing, degrades the purity or liberality of 

 the theoretical; that indeed if he had not to get his daily bread 

 the high-minded student may do well to let the shop severely alone. 

 Thus the university is prone to make of education thought with- 

 out hands; the technical school, hands without thought; each 

 fighting shy of the other. But if in a liberal training the sciences 

 must be taught whereby the crafts are interpreted, economized, 

 and developed, no less do the crafts, by finding ever new problems 

 and tests for the sciences, inseminate and inform the sciences, as 

 in our day physics are fertilized by the fine craft of such men as 

 Helmholtz, Cornu, and Stokes; and biology by that of Virchow, 

 Pasteur, and Lister. At the commemoration of Stokes in West-, 

 minster Abbey, Lord Kelvin honored in him the "combination 

 of technical skill with intuition; " and Lord Rayleigh admired in 

 him "the reciprocity of accurate workmanship and instinctive 

 genius;" appreciations no less true of these two distinguished 

 speakers themselves. If it be true, as I have been told, that the 

 University of Birmingham has a coal-mine upon the premises, I am 

 ready to believe that the craft of coal-getting, by carrying practice 

 into thought, will fortify the web of theory. 



There exists, no doubt, the contrary danger of reducing educa- 

 tion to the narrow ideas and stationary habits of the mere artisan. 

 By stereotyped methods the shop-master who does not see beyond 

 his nose, may cramp the 'prentice, and this 'prentice becomes shop- 

 master in his turn. If in the feudal times, and times like them in 

 this respect, manual craft was despised, and the whole reason of 

 man was driven into the attenuated spray of abstract ingenuity, 

 in other times or parts of society a heavy plod of manual habit so 

 thickened "the nimble spirits in the arteries" that man was little 

 better than a beaver: on the one side matter, gross and blockish; 

 on the other, speculation vacuous of all touch of nature. We need 

 the elevation, the breadth, the imagination which universities create 

 and foster; but in universities we need also bridges in every parish 

 between the provinces of craft and thought. Our purpose must be 

 to obtain the blend of craft and thought, which, on the one hand, 

 delivers us from a creeping empiricism, on the other, from exorbi- 

 tant ratiocinations. That for the progress and advantage of know- 

 ledge the polar activities of sense and thought should find a fair 

 balance, is set forth judicially enough in modern philosophy, and 

 is eminent in great examples of mankind. Moreover, it is appre- 

 hended in the reciprocal tensions of faith and works, of hypothesis 

 and experience, of science and craft. In our controversies on theory 

 and practice, on universities and technical schools, on grammar 

 and apprenticeship, we see their opposite stresses. The unison is 

 far from being, as too often we suppose, one merely of wind and 



