Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on October 18, 1884 (IA b21778929).pdf/36

 preter of Nature. In the Letter, by which he dedicates to the President and Fellows of this College, his " Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals," he declares himself "the partisan of truth alone."" and throughout all his writings that follow he never swerved from the position he had taken. To him ". virtue," as it has been well said by Emerson, "lay in the adherence in action to the nature of things; and the nature of things made it prevail."

The intense love that Harvey felt for Nature led him to choose her as his constant companion, and his guide in the search for truth. There was nothing that she could show him that was too great for him to attempt to understand; nothing too small for him to pass by, or to regard with other feelings than those of affection, of reverence and wonder. The teaching of Nature was to him absolute in its authority. "The facts cognisable by the senses," he says, " wait upon no opinions, . . . the works of Nature bow to no antiquity; for indeed there is nothing either more ancient or of higher authority than Nature." 30

Harvey "observed" the facts before him, and he had eyes to see ;-but, not content with the " experiments pre- pared by Nature," he "made " new facts, by his skilful mani- pulation of the materials that were lying at his hand; and thus he asked pertinent questions, and obtained their answers. He thought about all these things; he reasoned upon them all; he sought and found all the help that meta- physical method and learning of the schools could render him; and, then, he became their "Interpreter."

His mode of progression may be defined as "longitudi- narian" (if I may use a word, coined, some years ago, in opposition to one very familiar to us all)-i.c., he looked and worked straight from end to end. His line was

29 On the Motion of the Heart, p. 7. 30 On the Circulation, p. 123.