Page:Restorative medicine - an Harveian annual oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on June 21, 1871 (the 210th anniversary) (IA restorativemedic00cham).pdf/94

80 RESTORATIVE MEDICINE. cases we are best acquainted with is within the limits of what we know of organic bodies; and no more intimate knowledge of the nature of life than we already possess is needed to lead to scientific treatment in the majority of cases we have to cure.

I go further than this, and I contend that you have no right to suggest the impossible as a bar to our search after the nature of life. By tracing the qualities of inanimate matter in the living, gradually further and further, we shall arrive at their approximate limit, and thus gain a rough outline of what life is, and what are the substances and functions which lie between spirit and matter. This outline has been hitherto drawn too much on the side of matter; and 1 may say also, that it has been drawn too sharp; as if the qualities of the one could never by transference become the properties of the other. Strangely enough, it is the theologians who have insisted upon fixing an impassable gulf between spiritual and material characteristics; though one would have thought that the Aoyos iyévero oap of St. John would have suggested transitional substances and times. I see in the far distance the promise of a union between physics and metaphysics. But I am not going to wait for that, and the main point I would make is that the