Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/771

Rh all charitable institutions and associations to give information of all assistance rendered by them to individuals living in the district.

Through this Intelligence Bureau reliable personal knowledge of every applicant for hospital-relief could be obtained. We fully appreciate the great difficulty of organizing and uniting voluntary charities in this country, where there are so many different religious sects; but by establishing such a system as the above much could be done toward distributing help where it is really needed, and toward preventing indiscriminate charity, and in detecting impostors. To avoid the injurious moral effects of hospitals on the characters of the inmates, and to prevent such bad sanitary conditions in hospitals as are sure to result in retarding cures, and often in the generation of fatal hospital-diseases, it is necessary to have hospitals constructed and managed in accordance with the teachings of sanitary science.

 

HIS versatile thinker, known to science by his "Seaside Studies" and his "Physiology of Common Life"—works of much originality—as well as by his "History of Philosophy" and his "Problems of Life and Mind," in which he puts forth independent views on scientific methodology, was born in London, April 18, 1817. At an early age he was sent to the Continent of Europe to receive an education, but returned while still a lad, and was then placed under the tuition of Dr. Burney, at Greenwich.

The influence of his residence abroad, during the impressionable period of boyhood, is seen in a greater degree of vivacity than is usual among his countrymen. On leaving school young Lewes became a clerk in a mercantile house, but, as his tastes inclined him rather to a literary and scientific than a business career, he left the counting-house and took up the study of anatomy and physiology. His interest in these sciences appears to have sprung purely from a thirst for knowledge, as he did not purpose to become a physician. As early as 1836 he had in contemplation a treatise on the philosophy of mind, in which the doctrines of the Scotch metaphysicians—Reid, Stewart, and Brown-were to be physiologically interpreted, and, during the following year, he gave a course of lectures upon this subject. The investigations made at this time were destined to be suspended for a while, but later to be resumed and pushed forward into the most difficult provinces of philosophical inquiry. The years 1838 and 1839 he spent in Germany, devoting himself with characteristic assiduity to the study of literature and philosophy. Besides acquiring a mastery of the German language, he gained an intimate