Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/391

Rh and experiment, he brings the instrumental agency of the mind as a reasoning power to bear upon them, and draws from them that which adds to the store of knowledge already possessed. He seeks for facts and interprets their meaning as they come before him. This was the course pursued by Harvey. Instead of giving himself up, as others had done before him, to arguing out conclusions from accepted axioms, he struck out into the hitherto untrodden path of inquiry—that of induction—and sought knowledge by a direct appeal to Nature through the medium of observation and experiment. "It were disgraceful," he says, "with this most spacious and admirable realm of Nature before us, did we take the reports of others upon trust, and go on coining crude problems out of these, and on them hanging knotty and captious and petty disputations. Nature is herself to be addressed; the paths she shows us are to be boldly trodden."

In the discovery of the circulation, Harvey applied the principles of induction, and argued upon them in a strictly logical way. He showed himself to be a good and careful observer, judged even by the standard set forth in the following words of John Stuart Mill, on the process of observing. "The observer," says Mill, "is not he who merely sees the thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts that thing is composed of. To do this well is a rare talent. One person, from inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of what he sees. Another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines or with what he infers. Another takes note of the kind of all the circumstances, but, being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain. Another sees, indeed, the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into parts, throwing things into one mass which require to be separated, and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse, than if no analysis had been attempted at all, It would be possible to point out what qualities of mind and modes of mental culture fit a person for being a good observer; that, however, is a question not of logic, but of the theory of education, in the most enlarged sense of the term."

The experiments which Harvey conducted on the arteries and veins to assist him in his inquiry were founded upon a well-devised plan. It may be said of experiment, that it affords the means of varying the circumstances, and thus aids immensely the acquirement of knowledge by induction. In the application of the faculties to discovery, the mind asks itself what facts are needed to assist in the establishment of a correct conclusion. The fact may be looked for among the varied instances presented by Nature; or, by an artificial arrangement of circumstances, the required instance may be made—in other words, experiment may be had recourse to for supplying what is wanted. In the one case, we get our fact by observation from the variations in the