Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, June 24, 1870 (IA b22307643).pdf/13

 ren. Cause and effect were to the logician but invariable sequences, of which he could give no account. To the physicist they now became essential continuities: effect was cause in a new form; suppression and re- appearance took the place of mere physical sequence. The stone which logic offered became bread in the hand of science. A boundless vista at once opened before the mind; and, instead of isolated and inde- pendent phenomena, the essential relations of all the physical forces became more or less clearly discernible, rendering it probable that as a mechanical cause in its simplest form is evolved into its effect by suppression, or as the higher forms of force, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism could be equally evolved under suitable material conditions from a merely mechanical cause by a similar suppression, so might the organic processes in their entirety be equally correlative of the lower forces. That as the living body neither formed nor transmuted its material elements, neither was it the creative centre