Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/54

5° HARVEY AND GALEN paid to them was succeeded by unjust neglect. They deserved neither the one nor the other. For Aristotle the reaction has come, and though no longer adored he receives due honour. For Galen I think the day of restitution cannot be long delayed. He was not one of the great geniuses of the world, but very high in the second rank. He was one of the most illustrious of all physiologists, and among the ancient physicians we may still allow him the old honourable epithet so often used, ‘ Omnium medicorum secundum Hippocratem facile princeps.

For our great Harvey we need not fear that his noble shade would be troubled at this tribute paid to his brilliant predecessor. His mind was too generous, and, indeed, it increases his praise, for to have succeeded where other acute intellects failed is the greater honour. Harvey him- self warmly acknowledged what he owed to Aristotle, and if he mentioned Galen less it was because the force of circumstances made him his opponent. But at this distance of time we can see plainly that it was hardly necessary to mention him, for in so many places his work is taken for granted.

As I remarked in the beginning, all great work is based on work done before, even where the results appear to be different. And so we arrive, I venture to suggest, at the generalization that all high thought is really continuous. The magic of literature brings together thinkers widely separated in space and time, and, as one magnet makes other magnets, so the activity of one great mind sets other minds in vibration. The polarity of the second magnet may be opposite to that of the first, and so the result of the induced intellectual activity may be contradictory to that which set it in motion; but the one was nevertheless derived from the other. The moral is, I think, that the influence of the past on the present is even more potent than we commonly suppose. In common and trivial things we may ignore this connexion; in what is of enduring worth we cannot. As Goethe says, �