Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 2 of 2).djvu/61

Rh instruments it is easy to judge of their use and application, with no less certainty than we have been taught by Aristotle to recognize the nature of animals from the structure and arrangement of their bodily organs; and as physiognomy instructs us to judge of a man's disposition and character from the shape of his face and features, what should prevent us from supposing that where the same structure exists there is the same function implanted?

But it is so unfairly ordered that, when customary and familiar matters come to be debated, this very familiarity lessens their importance and our wonder; whilst things of much less moment, because they are novel and rare, appear to us far greater objects of marvel. Whoever has pondered with himself how the brain of the artist, or rather the artist by means of his brain, pictures to the life things which are not present to him, but which he has once seen; also in what manner birds immured in cages recall to mind the spring, and chant exactly the songs they had learned the preceding summer, although meanwhile they had never practised them; again, and this is more strange, how the bird artistically builds its nest, the copy of which it had never seen, and this not from memory or habit, but by means of an imaginative faculty (phantasia), and how the spider weaves its web, without either copy or brain, solely by the help of this imaginative power; whosoever, I say, ponders these things, will not, I think, regard it as absurd or monstrous, that the woman should be impregnated by the conception of a general immaterial "idea," and become the artificer of generation.

I know well that some censorious persons will laugh at this,—men who believe nothing true but what they think so themselves. Yet this that I do is the practice of philosophers, who, when they cannot clearly comprehend how a thing really is brought to pass, devise some mode for it in accordance with the other works of nature, and as near as possible to what is true. And indeed all those opinions which we now regard as of the greatest weight, were at the beginning mere figments and imaginations, until confirmed by experiments addressed to the senses, and made credible by a knowledge of their positive causes,