Page:The Harveian Oration1876.djvu/10

 Some men who have nothing to do with science have a mind like Harvey’s; there were examples of it in pre-scientilic days, and though it may be more common in our time, it has existed always. Nor is the term otherwise a correct one. Men of great mathematical insight must be called preeminently scientific; but the scientific mind to which I refer is not mathematical in the highest sense of the word. Harvey was one of those men who are urged on to submit everything to experiment and observation. As he himself says (I quote, of course, from Dr. Robert Willis’s admirable translation), “he professed to learn and teach anatomy, not from books, but from dissections—not from the positions of philosophers, but from the fabric of Nature.” And in his introduction to his work on Generation, where he has a chapter on the “Manner and Order of acquiring Knowledge,” he says, among other sentences to the same purport, that “all true science rests upon those principles which have their origin in the operation of the senses; and