wish--but I am getting near the end of my lecture--that the whole
theory is a speculation invented by cowards to excuse knaves. My
belief is, that so far as this old English stock is concerned it has in
it as much sap and vitality and power as it had two centuries ago; and
that, with due pruning of rotten branches, and due hoeing up of weeds,
which will grow about the roots, the like products will be yielded
again. The "weeds" to which I refer are mainly three: the first of
them is dishonesty, the second is sentimentality, and the third is
luxury. If William Harvey had been a dishonest man--I mean in the high
sense of the word--a man who failed in the ideal of honesty--he would
have believed what it was easiest to believe--that which he received on
the authority of his predecessors. He would not have felt that his
highest duty was to know of his own knowledge that that which he said
he believed was true, and we should never have had those
investigations, pursued through good report and evil report, which ended
in discoveries so fraught with magnificent results for science and for
man. If Harvey had been a sentimentalist--by which I mean a person of
false pity, a person who has not imagination enough to see that great,
distant evils may be much worse than those which we can picture to
ourselves, because they happen to be immediate and near (for that, I
take it, is the essence of sentimentalism)--if Harvey had been a person
of that kind, he, being one of the kindest men living, would never have
pursued those researches which, as he tells us over and over again, he
was obliged to pursue in order to the ascertainment of those facts which
have turned out to be of such inestimable value to the human race; and
I say, if on such grounds he had failed to do so, he would have failed
in his duty to the human race. The third point is that Harvey was
devoid of care either for wealth, or for riches, or for ambition. The
man found a higher ideal than any of these things in the pursuit of
truth and the benefit of his fellow-men. If we all go and do likewise,