Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/74

 truth in it than seems. I know of no more wholesome state of mind for the investigation of truth than the ever-present consciousness of the possibility of error.

I feel, however, that I have small justification for speaking of the frame of mind befitting those who investigate the great secrets of Nature. The magician’s power to compel her to disclose them has been denied to me. Miror magis. I wonder, I admire, and I rejoice in the safer, humbler walk which our profession opens to the less gifted, as it does to me.

The study of our body, of its wonderful adaptation of means to end, has led all of us to recognise the reign of law, and most of us to see behind the law the Lawgiver, ‘the divine Harmostes who arranges all in such methodical and tunable proportions.’ And yet we come upon the difficulties—the insoluble difficulties of mechanism, not so perfect but that it might have been more complete; sure to wear out, and in its decay certain to entail suffering,—suffering avoidable, unnecessary, which the great