Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, June 24, 1870 (IA b22307643).pdf/22

20 ever make greater and greater demands upon the intellect to fathom them. It is an operation which reaches so far as to include in its last developments an intellectual and a moral law,—all the infinite organic variety we see around us, and that subtle world we feel within.

The time is passing in which the human mind can remain satisfied to rest under the fetters it has imposed upon itself, or to cherish its own phantasms as if its very existence depended upon them. "Man knows only what he has observed of the course of nature" is the notorious dictum of science, showing the limit and the mode of the acquirement of our knowledge: the limit as wide as nature itself; and the mode but readiness to be taught. Notwithstanding, therefore, the adverse decision of schools and dogmas, science still occupies itself with the possibilities of occasional automatic generation. And that it should be so, let it not raise antagonism in the minds of those whose inquiries lie in another