Page:The Harveian oration 1906.djvu/44

38 of phenomena in mental biography is the failure of the Greeks to succeed after giving the world such a glorious start. They had every essential for permanent success : scientific imagination, keen powers of observation; and if in the days of Hippocrates the mathematical method of interrogating Nature prevailed rather than the experimental, Galen carried the latter to a degree of perfection never again reached until the time of Harvey. Only when placed in its true position in relation to Greek religion and philosophy, as has been done so skilfully by Gomperz, do we realize the immensity of the debt we owe to those ‘our young light-hearted masters’. And Gomperz makes clear the nature of the debt of Greek thought to the practical sense of the physicians. But alas! upon the fires they kindled were poured the dust and ashes of contending philosophies, and neither the men of the Alexandrian school nor the brilliant labours of the most encyclopaedic mind that has ever been given to medicine sufficed to replenish them. Fortunately, here and there amid the embers of the Middle Ages glowed the coals from which we have lighted the fires of modern progress. The special distinction which divides modern from ancient science is its fruitful application to human needs—not that this was unknown to the Greeks; but the practical recognition of the laws of life and matter has in the past century remade the world. In making knowledge effective we have succeeded where our masters failed. But this last and final stage, always of slow and painful