Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/13

 Is there, then, anything the physician need lack to realize all the conceptions of his understanding, and to satisfy all the yearnings of his heart? Surely, nothing. It, therefore, behooves every one who is preparing for the life of a physician to feel, at every step of his progress, how vast a field of knowledge he has undertaken to explore, how rich and varied are its products, and how exalted is the mission to which he is destined.

In the remarks that have been made respecting the relations of science and art in medicine, I was, perhaps, less explicit than was proper, for upon a right apprehension of these relations must depend in a great measure the fruitfulness of your professional studies, and the solid merit of your career a practitioners. Let me endeavor briefly to state the matter more clearly.

To one who is not content with the simple observation of facts, but seeks to learn their causes and mutual relations, it seems at first a dark problem how science and art shall be mad to harmonize with one another. He knows that perfection in the one should correspond to perfection in the other, since both are essentially but different modes of the same truth; that science should be prepared to explain the phenomena produced or observed by art, and that art, in like manner, should be competent to reduce into practice all the conclusions of science. It would, indeed, be so if scientific laws were absolute, and if the power of art to execute were perfect. But science in the abstract deals only with abstract ideas, and its laws are absolute only so long as they relate to such ideas. The substance, form, bulk, and other qualities of bodies in science are abstract notions, not concrete facts. The genus or species of the naturalist has no precise limitation in nature; nor has any simple substance, so called, nor any compound body, the precise constitution which in science it is assumed to possess. Thus in every statement or argument into which such elements enter, allowance must be made for departures from the theoretical idea of them. These statements suffice to illustrate the general proposition that every applied science is at best but a science of approximations; that absolute truth in