394 AIM AND PROGRESS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



That which our organs of sense perform is clearly suffi- 

 cient to meet the demands of science as well as the practical 

 ends of the man of business who must rely for support on 

 the knowledge of natural laws, acquired, partly involun- 

 tarily by daily experience, and partly purposely by the 

 study of science. 



Having now completed our survey, we may, perhaps, 

 strike a not unsatisfactory balance. Physical science has 

 made active progress, not only in this or that direction, 

 but as a vast whole, and what has been accomplished 

 may warrant the attainment of further progress. Doubts 

 respecting the entire conformity to law of nature are 

 more and more dispelled ; laws more general and more 

 comprehensive have revealed themselves. That the di- 

 rection which scientific study has taken is a healthy one 

 its great practical issues have clearly demonstrated ; and 

 I may here be permitted to direct particular attention 

 to the branch of science more especially my own. In 

 physiology particularly scientific work had been crippled 

 by doubts respecting the necessary conformity to law, 

 which means, as we have shown, the intelligibility of 

 vital phenomena, and this naturally extended itself to 

 the practical science directly dependent on physiology, 

 namely, medicine. Both have received an impetus, such 

 as had not been felt for thousands of years, from the time 

 that they seriously adopted the method of physical science, 

 the exact observation of phenomena and experiment. As 

 a practising physician, in my earlier days, I can per- 

 sonally bear testimony to this. I was educated at a 

 period when medicine was in a transitional stage, when 

 the minds of the most thoughtful and exact were filled 

 with despair. It was not difficult to recognise that the 

 old predominant theorising methods of practising medicine 

 were altogether untenable ; with these theories, however, 

 the facts on which they had actually been founded had 



