270 The Older Doctrines [lect. 



"deal of drudgery that he did undergo in his faculty (mostly 

 "for lucre sake) which did much shorten his life, he concluded 

 " his last day in his house in Saint Martin's Lane afore men- 

 " tioned on the 11th day of November 1675." 



Willis was not like Descartes a philosopher, and indeed was a 

 man of a wholly different order ; but he possessed what Descartes 

 did not, a practical knowledge of the details of the structure 

 and functions of the body and especially of the brain in health 

 and disease. His work on the brain, by which our knowledge 

 of cerebral structures was advanced far more largely than is 

 indicated by the mere addition to anatomical nomenclature of 

 the term ' circle of Willis,' became a classic work. The value 

 of the book is indeed much above the worth of the author. 

 Willis himself acknowledges that in his researches on the 

 brain he was much assisted by Richard Lower; and Wood 

 speaking of Lower says, "Willis whom he helped or rather 

 instructed.'' Lower as we have already seen was a real 

 man of science, with a clear penetrating mind, with a 

 genuine love of truth for truth's sake, a worthy mate of 

 Boyle, of Hooke and of Mayow. Willis was of a different 

 type ; love of truth was in hiui less potent than love of 

 fame. Mixing with and indeed in daily intercourse with the 

 band of exact inquirers, who at Oxford and in London were 

 striving to establish the new philosophy and advance by 

 experiment natural knowledge, Willis caught up their phrases 

 and thinking himself one of them, attempted to expound in 

 their fashion the physiology of the nervous system. But his 

 method, when he was left to himself, and deprived of the aid 

 and guidance of Lower was, in reality, wholly different from 

 theirs. They made exact observations and careful experiments 

 and, guided by the dry light of reason, drew conclusions with 

 caution, and expounded them with brevity, using words only as 

 expressing the meaning of things. Willis's mind was of the 

 rhetorical sort, he loved words as words, looked upon an 

 illustration as an argument, and when he discovered an analogy 

 thought he had found a proof. Hence when we come to 

 examine the views which he put forward, v r e find that while 

 they are expounded with a certain philosophit air which perhaps 



