452 THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD 



one of its most precious possessions not because we have 

 any right to plume ourselves upon their having existed as a 

 matter of national vanity, but because we have a just and 

 rational ground of expectation that the race which has 

 brought forth such products as these may, in good time 

 and under fortunate circumstances, produce the like again. 

 I am one of those people who do not believe in the natural 

 decay of nations. I believe, to speak frankly, though per- 

 haps not quite so politely as I could wish but I am getting 

 near the end of my lecture that the whole theory is a specu- 

 lation invented by cowards to excuse knaves. My belief is, 

 that so far as this old English stock is concerned it has in it 

 as much sap and vitality and power as it had two centuries 

 ago ; and that, with due pruning of rotten branches, and 

 due hoeing up of weeds, which will grow about the roots, the 

 like products will be yielded again. The " weeds " to which 

 I refer are mainly three : the first of them is dishonesty, the 

 second is sentimentality, and the third is luxury. If William 

 Harvey had been a dishonest man I mean in the high sense 

 of the word a man who failed in the ideal of honesty he 

 would have believed what it was easiest to believe that 

 which he received on the authority of his predecessors. He 

 would not have felt that his highest duty was to know of his 

 own knowledge that that which he said he believed was true, 

 and we should never have had those investigations, pursued 

 through good report and evil report, which ended in dis- 

 coveries so fraught with magnificent results for science and 

 for man. If Harvey had been a sentimentalist by which I 

 mean a person of false pity, a person who has not imagination 

 enough to see that great, distant evils may be much worse 

 than those which we can picture to ourselves, because they 

 happen to be immediate and near (for that, I take it, is the 

 essence of sentimentalism) if Harvey had been a person 

 of that kind, he, being one of the kindest men living, would 

 never have pursued those researches which, as he tells us 

 over and over again, he was obliged to pursue in order to 

 the ascertainment of those facts which have turned out to be 

 of such inestimable value to the human race ; and I say, if 

 on such grounds he had failed to do so, he would have failed 

 in his duty to the human race. The third point is that 

 Harvey was devoid of care either for wealth, or for riches, 

 or for ambition. The man found a higher ideal than any 

 of these things in the pursuit of truth and the benefit of his 

 fellow-men. If we all go and do likewise, I think there is no 



