March 2, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



325 



kind offices of the middle man, into the 

 consciousness of the practitioner. It is the 

 participation by the practical man in the 

 theory, through the agency of the linking 

 science, that determines at once the effec- 

 tiveness of the work done, and the moral 

 freedom and personal development of the 

 one engaged in it. It is because the physi- 

 cian no longer follows rules, which, however 

 rational in themselves, are yet arbitrary to 

 him (because grounded in principles that 

 he does not understand), that his work is 

 becoming liberal, attaining the dignity of a 

 profession, instead of remaining a mixture 

 of empiricism and quackery. It is because, 

 alas, engineering makes only a formal and 

 not a real connection between physics and 

 the practical workingmen in the mills, that 

 our industrial problem is an ethical problem 

 of the most serious kind. The question of 

 the amount of wages the laborer receives, 

 of the purchasing value of this wage, of the 

 hours and conditions of labor, are, after all, 

 secondary. The problem primarily roots in 

 the fact that the mediating science does not 

 connect with his consciousness, but merely 

 with his outward actions. He does not 

 appreciate the significance and bearing of 

 what he does ; and he does not perform his 

 work because of sharing in a larger scien- 

 tific and social consciousness. If he did, 

 he would be free. All other proper ac- 

 companiments of wage, and hours, healthful 

 and inspiring conditions would be added 

 unto him, because he would have entered 

 into the ethical kingdom. Shall we seek 

 analogy with the teacher's calling in the 

 workingmen in the mill, or in the scientific 

 physician ? 



It is quite likely that I shall be reminded 

 that I am overlooking an essential differ- 

 ence. The physician, it will be said, is 

 dealing with a body which either is in 

 itself a pure object, a causal interplay of 

 anatomical elements, or is something which 

 lends itself naturally and without essential 



loss to treatment from this point of view ; 

 while the case is quite different in the ma- 

 terial with which the teacher deals. Here 

 is personality, which is destroyed when re- 

 garded as an object. But the gap is not so 

 pronounced nor so serious as this objection 

 implies. The physician after all is not 

 dealing with a lifeless body ; with a simple 

 anatomical structure, or interplay of me- 

 chanical elements. Life functions, active 

 operations, are the reality which confront 

 him. "We do not have to go back many 

 centuries in the history of medicine to find 

 a time when the physician attempted to 

 deal with these functions directly and im- 

 mediately. They were so overpoweringly 

 present, they forced themselves upon him 

 so obviouslj' and so constantly that he had 

 no resource save a mixture of magic and 

 empiricism : magic, so far as he followed 

 methods derived from uncritical analogy, 

 or from purely general speculation on the 

 universe and life ; empiricism, so long as he 

 just followed procedures which had been 

 found helpful before in cases which some- 

 what resembled the present. We have 

 only to trace the intervening history of 

 medicine to appreciate that it is precisely 

 the ability to state function in terms of 

 structure, to reduce life in its active op- 

 erations to terms of a causal mechanism, 

 which has taken the medical calling out of 

 this dependence upon a vibration between 

 superstition and routine. Progress has 

 come by taking what is really an activity 

 as if it were only an object. It is the ca- 

 pacity to effect this transformation of life 

 activity which measures both the scientific 

 character of the physician's procedure and 

 his practical control, the certainty and effi- 

 cacy of what he, as a living man, does in 

 relation to some other living man. 



It is an old story, however, that we must 

 not content ourselves with analogies. We 

 must find some specific reason in the prin- 

 ciples of the teacher's own activities for 



