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failures of their predecessors — to toil at the same Sisyphean 
task, to be met by the same impassable bounds, to catch 
the same vanishing and partial glimpses, to be conscious 
of the same incompetency, to confess the same utter and 
disheartening defeat. One after another, they retire from 
the voyage of discovery weary and baffled, some in ex- 
asperation of mortified ambition, some having learned the 
rich lesson of humility ; a few in faith and hope ; many in 
bewilderment and despair; but none in knowledge,” that is, 
of the kind they seek. But I bear in mind that in order to 
combat views and opinions that are abroad, working incal- 
culable evil in the minds of many, more especially of the 
impressionable and the young among us, it is necessary, not 
only to refute those views and opinions, but to attack them 
resolutely. War to be successful must be aggressive. 
The Chairman. — I have now to return the thanks of the meeting to 
Surgeon-General Gordon for his very interesting paper. I think it has one 
defect, and that is, I am afraid we all so thoroughly agree with it, that it will 
provoke very little discussion. 
The Hon. Secretary then read the following letter from Dr. W. B. 
Carpenter, C.B., F.R.S. : — 
“ February 17 , 1883 . 
“ Dear Sir, — I am sorry that, as I have to lecture at Leicester on Monday 
evening, I cannot accept the invitation to the meeting. I am much obliged 
to Surgeon- General Gordon for his kindly mention of my scientific work ; 
and may say that while I entirely accept ‘ Evolution’ as an expression of the 
probable order of Creation, I am in full agreement with him as to the in- 
capacity of any Scientific doctrine to do more than carry us back to a First 
Cause, whose modus operandi it is the province of Science to search out.” 
Mr. Foster Palmer. — I think it will be admitted that one point has been 
very fully brought out in the paper, namely, that “ there is nothing new 
under the sun.” There is nothing so striking to the student of history as 
the constant repetition of old ideas under new forms. This would appear to 
be due to the lability of the human mind to get out of the track which 
has been beaten for us by our predecessors. I believe it was Aristotle who first 
discovered, or fancied he had discovered, that the heart was the seat of the 
affections, and we have never been able to get out of that fallacy, even down 
to the present day, although we now know that the brain is the seat of 
all the mental operations. Hippocrates spoke of nature as a sentient being, 
as a person ; in all his remarks about nature he referred to it as a person ; 
and people still speak of the laws of nature in a manner only applicable to 
a sentient agency. Again, belief in demoniacal possession, formerly so 
general, is now almost universally discarded by physiologists ; while the 
Paracelsian idea of immaterial bodies is precisely the view held by those 
thinkers of the present day who call themselves spiritualists. For the 
