Page:Hunterian oration, delivered in the theatre of the Royal College of Surgeons in London on February 14th 1829 (electronic resource) (IA b2148305x).pdf/17

Rh Hunter, that his labours were directed to place physiology and pathology in the elevated rank of sciences.

The qualification for advancing science is the power of exercising the higher order of faculties of the intellect upon any subject for investigation. The science which is termed the strict, the mathematical, indisputably determines this question. The application of the mind here is to quantity and number, and it has the ablest means of grappling with the subject. The intellect here throws its penetration much further than it commonly does in other researches, and thus produces a certainty elsewhere unknown. It is, perhaps, because the intellect, unencumbered, as when the senses interpose, grasps the subject in all its relations, and is able, as it were, to dispose it in every possible view, and subject it to every sort of combination and comparison, and bring out all its properties. It is the in-