Page:The Harveian oration, 1875 (IA b22314611).pdf/45

us his own views respecting “the manner and order of acquiring knowledge” in one chapter, he presents us in another with a dissertation on “ the same matters, according to Aristotle,” whom “foremost of all among the ancients,” he follows as his leader.

Harvey, preeminently a practical man; the accurate observer; ingenious in devising, skilful in performing experiments, the practised logician and acute critic of the views of others about matters which he himself studies and understands, can appreciate the great Greek philosopher whom Bacon, the man of the closet and study, industriously depreciates. This being so, what, you may ask, is it that Harvey complains of in the scientific habits and methods of his contemporaries? what does he find to reform and amend? Aristotle was in the right. Harvey in the main approves his method and his logic. How then have Harvey’s contemporaries exposed themselves to rebuke and correction? Simply by lacking the industry for which he gives the ancients credit. Bor Harvey tells us that it was “ the custom, or vice rather, of the age” he lived in, that men preferred going idly “wrong with the many” to becoming industriously “wise with the few.”