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THE HABVEIAN ORATION. 761 



Aubrey has left on record about him, feeling more and more 

 strongly as I grew better aquainted with Harvey that — 



' These were slanders : never yet 

 Was noble man but made ignoble talk.' 



I will speak first of his scientific character^ though it may seem 

 strange to speak of scientific character ^ as character implies, perhaps, 

 a moral element ; and science, so far as it is really science, and 

 based exclusively upon sound reasoning, has no moral element in it ; 

 reasoning, so long as it is sound, being of one kind always, and 

 devoid therefore of all distinctive or personal factors. It is neces- 

 sary for me to say that I do not forget that Harvey was but 

 eighteen years junior to Bacon, 



*Whom a wise king and Nature chose 

 Lord Chancellor of both their laws/ 



But neither do I forget that the Novum Organon was published in 

 1620, subsequently to the discovery and actual demonstration of 

 the circulation (see Dedicatio to the treatise ' De Motu Cordis '), if 

 not to the publication of the treatise on the ' Motion of the Heart ; ' 

 and that the Royal Society, with its motto, ' NuUius addictus jurare 

 in verba magistri,' was a foundation of a much later date. And 

 consequently, I think, we may feel justified in saying that, so far 

 as the purely scientific factor of a man^s nature can be said to have 

 any distinctive or personal character at all, independence, or robust- 

 ness, or manliness, whichever word we may like to choose, as shown 

 in superiority to mere authority and the w^eight of great names, 

 was a distinctive character of Harvey as a man of science. With 

 Riolanus in full vigour, and Van der Linden growing towards 

 maturity, as champions of antiquity, it required not a little manli- 

 ness to assert, 'contra receptas vias per tot saecula annorum ab 

 innumeris iisque clarissimis doctissimisque viris' (Riolanus was 

 often thus spoken of), ' tritam atque illustratam' ('Dedicatio,' p. 5), 

 the claims of simple Nature ' qua nihil antiquius majorisve auctori- 

 tatis' ('Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum,' p. 123). This element of 

 real manliness shows itself again, I think, in Harvey's power of 

 abstaining from suggesting a rationale of what he felt he did not 

 understand ; as, for example, in what is known (out of England, at 

 least) as the ' Problem of Harvey ' (see ' De Partu,' pp. 132, 549. ed. 

 1766; p. 530, ed. Willis)— a problem which, I think, could not 



