Page:The Harveian oration ; delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, June 26th, 1879 (IA b24976465).pdf/50

 man who dares to look into the composition and the mode of operation of the material world around him must pay so heavy a price for his passion for knowledge.

It were very sad if this were true, and might behove us even now to look around us and ask ourselves whether we are indeed well and worthily employed, but we refuse to believe so absurd a fiction. The wonder is how any one professing picty can regard the mechanism of God's works as low. We can understand the feeling which makes a man shudder at the sight of a dissected body, but when the strangeness of the sight is past, and he can contemplate it without disgust, it by no means lessens the appreciation of its beauty when clothed in its integument. Cannot he regard it with the artistic eye and yet have a more perfect knowledge of its anatomy. Ilear what a learned professor of anatomy, Wendell Holmes, can say "Science represents the thought of God discovered by man; by learning the natural laws he attaches effects to their first cause, the will of the Creator," or in the poetic language of Goëthe:

"Nature is the living garment of God."