Spare Hours. Brown John

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СКАЧАТЬ central power of knowing what is what, and what it is worth, of choosing and rejecting, of judging; and finally, Efficax– the will and the way – the power to turn all the other three – capacity, perspicacity, sagacity, to account, in the performance of the thing in hand, and thus rendering back to the outer world, in a new and useful form, what you had received from it. These are the intellectual qualities which make up the physician, without any one of which he would be mancus, and would not deserve the name of a complete artsman, any more than proteine would be itself if any one of its four elements were amissing.

      We have left ourselves no room to speak of the books we have named at the end of this paper. We recommend them all to our young readers. Arnauld’s excellent and entertaining Art of Thinking– the once famous Port-Royal Logic – is, if only one be taken, probably the best. Thomson’s little book is admirable, and is specially suited for a medical student, as its illustrations are drawn with great intelligence and exactness from chemistry and physiology. We know nothing more perfect than the analysis, at page 348, of Sir H. Davy’s beautiful experiments to account for the traces of an alkali, found when decomposing water by galvanism. It is quite exquisite, the hunt after and the unearthing of “the residual cause.” This book has the great advantage of a clear, lively, and strong style. We can only give some short extracts.

INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION

      “We may define the inductive method as the process of discovering laws and rules from facts, and causes from effects; and the deductive, as the method of deriving facts from laws, and effects from their causes.”

      There is a valuable paragraph on anticipation and its uses – there is a power and desire of the mind to project itself from the known into the unknown, in the expectation of finding what it is in search of.

      “This power of divination, this sagacity, which is the mother of all science, we may call anticipation. The intellect, with a dog-like instinct, will not hunt until it has found the scent. It must have some presage of the result before it will turn its energies to its attainment. The system of anatomy which has immortalized the name of Oken, is the consequence of a flash of anticipation, which glanced through his mind when he picked up, in a chance walk, the skull of a deer, bleached by the weather, and exclaimed – ‘It is a vertebral column!’”

      “The man of science possesses principles – the man of art, not the less nobly gifted, is possessed and carried away by them. The principles which art involves, science evolves. The truths on which the success of art depends lurk in the artist’s mind in an undeveloped state, guiding his hand, stimulating his invention, balancing his judgment, but not appearing in regular propositions.” “An art (that of medicine for instance) will of course admit into its limits, everything (and nothing else) which can conduce to the performance of its own proper work; it recognizes no other principles of selection.”

      “He who reads a book on logic, probably thinks no better when he rises up than when he sat down, but if any of the principles there unfolded cleave to his memory, and he afterwards, perhaps unconsciously, shapes and corrects his thoughts by them, no doubt the whole powers of his reasoning receive benefit. In a word, every art, from reasoning to riding and rowing, is learned by assiduous practice, and if principles do any good, it is proportioned to the readiness with which they can be converted into rules, and the patient constancy with which they are applied in all our attempts at excellence.”

      “A man can teach names to another man, but he cannot plant in another’s mind that far higher gift – the power of naming.”

      “Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.”

      “The whole of every science may be made the subject of teaching. Not so with art; much of it is not teachable.”

      Coleridge’s profound and brilliant, but unequal, and often somewhat nebulous Essay on Method, is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of method. Method is the road by which you reach, or hope to reach, a certain end; it is a process. It is the best direction for the search after truth. System, again, which is often confounded with it, is a mapping out, a circumscription of knowledge, either already gained, or theoretically laid down as probable. Aristotle had a system which did much good, but also much mischief. Bacon was chiefly occupied in preparing and pointing out the way – the only way – of procuring knowledge. He left to others to systematize the knowledge after it was got; but the pride and indolence of the human spirit lead it constantly to build systems on imperfect knowledge. It has the trick of filling up out of its own fancy what it has not the diligence, the humility, and the honesty, to seek in nature; whose servant, and articulate voice, it ought to be.

      Descartes’ little tract on Method is, like everything the lively and deep-souled Breton did, full of original and bright thought.

      Sir John Herschel’s volume needs no praise. We know no work of the sort, fuller of the best moral worth, as well as the highest philosophy. We fear it is more talked of than read.

      We would recommend the article in the Quarterly Review as first-rate, and written with great eloquence and grace.

      Sydney Smith’s Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philosophy. Second Edition.

      Sedgwick’s Discourse on the Studies at Cambridge, with a Preface and Appendix. Sixth Edition.

      We have put these two worthies here, not because we had forgotten them, – much less because we think less of them than the others, especially Sydney. But because we bring them in at the end of our small entertainment, as we hand round a liqueur – be it Curaçoa, Kimmel, or old Glenlivet – after dinner, and end with the heterogeneous plum-pudding – that most English of realized ideas. Sydney Smith’s book is one of rare excellence, and well worthy of the study of men and women, though perhaps not transcendental enough for our modern philosophers, male and female. It is really astonishing how much of the best of everything, from patriotism to nonsense, is to be found in this volume of sketches. You may read it through, if your sides can bear such an accumulation of laughter, with great benefit; and if you open it anywhere, you can’t read three sentences without coming across some, it may be common thought, and often original enough, better expressed and put than you ever before saw it. The lectures on the Affections, the Passions and Desires, and on Study, we would have everybody to read and enjoy.

      Sedgwick is a different, and, as a whole, an inferior man; but a man every inch of him, and an Englishman too, in his thoughts, and in his fine mother wit and tongue. He has, in the midst of all his confusion and passionateness, the true instinct of philosophy – the true venatic sense of objective truth. We know nothing better in the main, than his demolition of what is untrue, and his reduction of what is absurd, and his taking the wind out of what is tympanitic, in the notorious Vestiges; we don’t say he always does justice to what is really good in it; his mission is to execute justice upon it, and that he does. His remarks on Oken and Owen, and his quotations from Dr. Clarke’s admirable paper on the Development of the Fœtus, in the Cambridge Philosophical Transactions, we would recommend to our medical friends. The very confusion of Sedgwick is the free outcome of a deep and racy nature; it puts us in mind of what happened, when an Englishman was looking with astonishment and disgust at a Scotchman eating a singed sheep’s head, and was asked by the eater what he thought of that dish? “Dish, sir, do you call that a dish?” “Dish or no dish,” rejoined the Caledonian, “there’s a deal o’ fine confused feedin’ aboot it, let me tell you.”

      We conclude these rambling remarks with a quotation from Arnauld, the friend of Pascal, and the intrepid antagonist of the Vatican and the Grand Monarque; one of the noblest, freest, most untiring and honest intellects, our world has ever seen. “Why don’t you rest sometimes?” said his friend СКАЧАТЬ