Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on October 18, 1884 (IA b21778929).pdf/37

 the shortest one that he could draw between the simplest- the first faet observed and the most remote objeet of his gaze. He thought in a straight line;" he never swerved in his forward mareh; but, as he passed onwards, he saw things outlying, on by-paths, but his own force of movement dragged them into his own well-ehosen course, and he made them help him on his way. Arrived at his goal, he arranged his materials with eare, and proceeded to explain their meaning by a simple induetive process. But,still keeping the same point in view, he approached it from other sides. Sometimes his lines, although converging, did not meet at the point he quite expected. Here, his power of thinking outside of, and beyond the facts came to help him; he made new observations, new experi- ments, and at last focussed them on a point made bright by the rays of his own genius. Dr. Ent spoke but the truth when he said to the President and Fellows of this College, "Our Harvey rather seems as though diseovery were natural to him; a thing of ease, and, of course, a matter of ordi- nary business; though he may nevertheless have expended infinite labour and study on his works." "¹

4. Harvey made use of working hypotheses; but he never eonfounded them with either facts, inductions, or laws. He claimed in one of his ingenious theses the liberty which he willingly yielded to others, "to put for- ward as true (in matters full of obseurity) suel things as appear to be probable until proved to be manifestly false;" and after demolishing many theories of others, "prayed for a place for his own" conjecture until something eertain should be established in the matter."

5. If some faet, apparently opposed to a truth that Harvey believed himself to have shed, confronted him in his way, he rode over it, with a force that could only

31 Epistle Dedicatory, p. 149. On Conception, p. 577. 33 Ibid. p. 580.