INTRODUCTION[1].
IN the many Harveian Orations which have been delivered since the death of the founder of modern physiology the direct aspects of his honour and of his work have been exhausted; of late years the orators have concerned themselves with indirect aspects. Some of my friends have said to me that they lack a perspective view of Harvey and his work; that even highly educated men have little sense of his relation to medieval thought, or of the evolution of medieval into modern thought. Of the several stars of the constellation—of Copernicus, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey—they had some knowledge; but how came Harvey to be at Padua? how did science spring up in North Italy? did science arise out of the womb of medicine, or contrariwise? why did natural science not flourish in the thirteenth century, and was it not a great misfortune for Europe that it did not then flourish? what were the systems of thought which in the Middle Ages preceded, encouraged or thwarted the travail of the human mind, and what of good or ill do we owe to them? These and such questions it seemed not unfitting that a Harveian Orator of this latter day should consider. Now on the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and on its relation to the era of positive science of which Harvey was perhaps the chief pioneer, there lay in a drawer in my cabinet the confused and occasional notes of many years. An interest in this thorny subject, sown in my mind at first by accident, and reawakened by these enquiring friends, had for me the charms of an old fancy, and I trust some brief essay thereon may have a temporary service; if, that is, I can touch the imagination of my hearers, and after some broken fashion bring before them a vision of the nations swayed hither and thither upon the face of Europe by a thirst for knowledge of a kind different, both in its methods and in its aims, from our own.
This oration cannot have the merit of an original study. Had I the equipment I have not the leisure to carry my investigations to the sources. Yet I may have attained to some maturity of judgment herein by long occupation of my mind since, in 1863, my old friend Mr Thomas Marshall of Leeds, sometime of St John’s College, Oxford, interested me in the life and work of Roger Bacon, the only eminent forerunner of the great naturalists of the seventeenth century.
The art of the Middle Ages and the social and political history of the time have fascinated modern Europe; for medieval thought, though its phrases survive in their mouths, few persons have shown any care: yet to these conflicts we owe what we are. No great battles of mankind have been fought in vain; none of its great captains has deserved oblivion. Yet we shrug our shoulders at their uncouth or outlandish names; we assume that from their chairs there issued naught but rhetoric, casuistries and fallacies, and that their multitudinous disciples were silly moths.
Each period of human achievement has its phases of spring, culmination, and decline; and it is in its decline that the leafless tree comes to judgment. In the unloveliness of decay the Middle Ages are as other ages have been, as our own will be: but in those ages there was more than one outburst of life; more than once the enthusiasm of the youth of the West went out to explore the ways of the realm of ideas; and, if we believe ourselves at last to have found the only thoroughfare, we owe this knowledge to those who before us travelled the uncharted seas. If we have inherited a great commerce and dominion of science it is because their argosies had been on the ocean, and their camels on the desert. “Discipulus est prioris posterior dies”; man cannot know all at once; knowledge must be built up by laborious generations. In all times, as in our own, the advance of knowledge is very largely by elimination and negation; we ascertain what is not true, and we weed it out. To perceive and to respect the limits of the knowable we must have sought to transgress them. We can build our bridge over the chasm of ignorance with stored material in which the thirteenth century was poor indeed, we can fix our bearings where then was no foundation; yet man may be well engaged when he knows not the ends of his work; and the schoolmen in digging for treasure cultivated the field of knowledge, even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin. Their many errors came not of indolence, for they were passionate; not of hatred of light, for they were eager for the light; not of fickleness, for they wrought with unparalleled devotion; nor indeed of ignorance of particular things, for they knew many things: they erred because they did not know, and they could not know, the conditions of the problems which, as they emerged from the cauldron of war and from the wreck of letters and science, they were nevertheless bound to attack, if civil societies worthy of the name were to be constructed. How slow in gestation is the mother of truth we may see by comparing the schoolmen of the second medieval period with those of the first; in the enlargement of their view, the better furniture of their minds, and the deeper meaning of their distinctions: and when we compare with these later schoolmen the naturalists of the seventeenth century, we find not new acquirements only but also a new direction of the pursuit of truth.
It seems hardly comprehensible that great and stable societies have been built up on transcendental schemes of thought, upon conceptions poised as it were in the air. Without a system of morals no civil society could exist; yet if mankind must have waited for civil polity until some such system were built up from below, of scientifically tested materials, social constructions would have been virtually impossible. In morals, as in the arts, the art precedes the science; the intuitions of genius imagine social schemes of provisional validity, and new and lofty standards of fitness. But a social fabric thus born of a vision can bear no rough handling; and even the solid builders who would make a more permanent foundation upon positive conceptions, while seeking more or less deliberately to underpin the fabric, may, and often do, shake it to ruin.
Hence in all guardians of morals the dread of meddling with the reigning vision of truth; hence its sanctity, that no man shall try the stuff of which it is made. And the dangers of heresies from within are more fearful than those of alien attacks; social cohesion, the end of it all, is thereby more exposed to disintegration. Yet nevertheless, as the generations of men change, and as knowledge increases, men see from new points of view; and thus while for some the reigning vision retains its apparent solidity, for others its rays are broken or dissolved. Even John Henry Newman was compelled to teach the relativity of truth, and that a doctrine of development must be accepted. For every provisional synthesis then the time must come when the apparition of truth can no longer command united allegiance, and criterions begin to encroach upon sanctions. Broader and more stable foundations have, it is true, been rising almost insensibly, yet it may be long ere the superstructure rise into the heavenly light; in the lower work many will see no beauty and no hope, others will see safety in its enlargement and solidity. By these indeed the visions of the imagination are apt to be forgotten, or in the pressure of intellectual verification even despised; the mean level of conception may not indeed be lower, it may haply be higher, yet the highest, wherein truth may be revealed by illumination, is not divined in its full force, abundance and life. Great seers are wont to leave to others to find out, or even to care, what bottom they stood upon; yet only through transitory periods of a humbler duty than theirs can the bases be laid and enlarged for times of richer fruition. One of the profoundest of modern sayings was that of Freeman—that the end of modern material progress is to bring large societies up to the level of small ones.
This is the day of a great celebration; that on this anniversary I am worthy to take a place in the succession of your Orators is more than I dare to believe, that you have deemed me worthy is my encouragement. In private duty also I am bound to honour one of the greatest of the sons of the University of Cambridge, and the greatest member of the ancient and honourable house of Gonville and Caius College.