Page:Hunterian oration, delivered in the theatre of the Royal College of Surgeons in London on February 14th 1829 (electronic resource) (IA b2148305x).pdf/27

Rh detaining them from the exercise of their own powers of investigation.

The mind of intellectual man is active, penetrating, and inquisitive. It pursues its operations with rapidity and vivacity, without charging the memory with all the steps of its procedure. To conduct its operations without marking all the minor proprositions as it proceeds, is a proof of its vigor and of its capacity of prosecuting a subject to the utmost point of investigation. Superior minds catch at a glance the whole process of a problem: but dull reasoners must have every step in a proposition amply filled up, and find stages to repose at, before they can advance. Newton went beyond all the common mathematicians of his day, and it became the task of humbler men who followed, to comment upon his writings; and to fill up the intermediate steps which he, in his mighty grasp of mind, did not deem necessary to explain. Hunter