Page:The Harveian Oration1876.djvu/17

 perhaps, when, by long dwelling on the impenetrable mysteries of generation, he allowed his mind to wander a little from the phenomena to their hidden causes. He possessed, however, in a very marked extent, one character of the class of minds to which he belonged. He had faith in facts. Now this may seem a common matter, but it is not altogether so. Many observers have a great mistrust of the facts they have themselves discovered. They are biased by previous theories, they do not see how their new facts fit in, they think there is some mistake, or they do not really fully see what they have seen. At any rate, they explain away what seems to them strange and unlikely, and really modify or alter what they have found. They are, in fact, honestly untruthful. Harvey was quite otherwise; when he had seen and touched, so to speak, a fact, and knew it was so, he accepted it, no matter how it struck on previous knowledge. To this clear truthfulness he owed his great discovery. I will only refer to one example of what I mean.