ON THE IMAGINATION 91 



experiment, at times lighted up with scintillations of 

 forethought and scientific imagination, and a consequently 

 safely constructed edifice of solid, but necessarily still 

 incomplete, biological truth. 



The structural and functional knowledge thereby placed 

 at the disposal of the clinical observer enables him now to 

 unravel the hitherto absolutely obscure problems of the 

 action of morbid influences in the causation of disease, 

 and confers the power so to define and demarcate the 

 areas of these influences by structural and functional 

 limitations, that he can, with comparative exactitude, 

 diagnose, and also to a large extent indicate, an appropriate 

 treatment for diseases of all natures and characters. 



Exact clinical methods of diagnosis and treatment being 

 founded on the scientific knowledge of the organism 

 affected, the manner of causation of the morbid pheno- 

 mena which it displays, and a growing power to cope with 

 the ravages of the various disease-producing influences 

 from which it suffers, it becomes warrantable to indulge in 

 the chastened imagination that human life will ultimately 

 be made to last out to its legitimate close, with the 

 enjoyment of health begotten of the abolition of morbid 

 entities, and the absolute reign of physiological law and 

 order throughout the entire human race. 



In this process of increased precision in diagnosis of 

 disease, the indications of the proper methods of pre- 

 vention and treatment, and the wholesale education of 

 the people in the laws of health, hold out the bright hope 

 that the day may at last dawn when imagination will end 

 in and embrace realisation, therefore, we again bespeak 

 a free and exact use of the faculty of imagination, in 

 the role of suggesting and perfecting the means to this 

 glorious end. 



This latter use of imagination pre-supposes the possession 

 by its employers of exact knowledge on the subject involved, 

 and the exhaustion of that knowledge in the cause of 

 original research on it, in which case he is permitted to 

 give rein to his imagination, with a deliberate intention to 

 accomplish his ambition of adding to that exact knowledge. 



Under all such circumstances, in the experience of the 

 advance of knowledge, it is found that free use has 



