“Duo enim sunt modi cognoscendi, scilicet per argumentum et experimentum. Argumentum concludit, et facit nos concludere quæstionem, sed non certificat, neque removet dubitationem, ut quiescat animus in intuitu veritatis, nisi eam inveniat via experientiæ.” Roger Bacon , Op. Majus , Venet. 1750, p. 336....

I N the Middle Ages the old world had passed, and the vision of a new world came near to the eager and passionate hearts of many peoples. Lincoln and Wells, Amiens and Chartres, Florence and Assisi tell us of the glory of that vision; and bear witness of its flight: for with Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey and Newton the Middle Ages themselves became a phantom, and again the spirit of a new world appeared. Thus in the phases of time the world dies and is born again; fulfilling greater destinies. But th

I N 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

Besides those greater preventions which lay in the very structure and organised conceptions of society in the Middle Ages, the student of natural science was thwarted also by many lesser, which could not find place in this oration. Among the chief of these was judicial astrology, which supplanted and degraded the art of medicine. It is difficult to carry the imagination into a time when the heavens were conceived as an animate and divine being 77 , the heavenly bodies as active and intelligent p