EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 679 
nature of the functional disorder at the precise seat of the 
lesion. 
We will not seek, either, to enter into further examination 
of the consequences obtained by the knowledge thus ac¬ 
quired of the objects just mentioned, with respect to certain 
nervous disorders of the most serious kind, which, until now, 
had conveyed the greatest disappointment and discourage¬ 
ment to the hearts of medical men, and which now present 
the greatest hope of successful domination for the future. 
Once more, let us repeat, we must be careful to guard 
against over-abundant proof. 
We have said enough to show that, without the aid of 
vivisection, we should remain in almost total ignorance of 
the functions of the nervous system which regulate our 
economy, the complete mastery over which can alone give a 
solid foundation to philosophy and moral teaching. Our 
pretended professed philosophers, who make to themselves 
a kind of glory in their profession of ignorance of the phy¬ 
siology of the human frame, and who yet assume a thorough 
competence of judgment in their long-winded dissertations 
on the human understanding, produce in my mind the effect 
of a madman who might undertake to drive a steam-engine, 
without ever having studied the organs of which it is com¬ 
posed, nor the nature of their uses. No one could possibly 
wonder, in such a case, to see the train thus conducted hurry 
to its ruin. 
The aim pursued by vivisectors—the knowledge of man— 
the immense results already obtained in this line, inde¬ 
pendently of those relating to objects of a less elevated order, 
all this does not allow us to admit a moment’s doubt of the 
utility of vivisection as a principle, as a means of scientific 
research, worthy of the approbation of all who are sincerely 
interested in the progress of science, which means the real 
welfare of humanity. 
But to deserve this approbation, the science of vivisection 
must be strictly maintained within the limits of this noble 
aim. It must be regarded solely as the means of verifying 
by experiment a hypothesis circumscribed beforehand, so as 
to limit the sufferings of the living creature upon whom they 
are necessarily imposed to the bare research of the solution 
of the difficulty under consideration. Beyond such limits, 
the question of cruelty begins, inasmuch as it is at this 
point that commences the gratuitous infliction of pain, the 
absence of utility. Vivisection can only be exercised with 
morality when its object is the pursuit of new discoveries, 
of course, in the silence and solitude of the laboratory, and 
