[1] Address on the Present State of Therapeutics. Delivered at the opening meeting of the Clinical Society of London, January 10, 1868. By Sir Thomas Watson, Bart., M.D.
This brings us to the third class--the very small number of persons who are, in the matter of human progress, the salt of the earth; the few who can endure to see without understanding, to hear without immediately believing or disbelieving, to learn what they can, without any consideration of what figure they themselves shall make in the transaction; and even to be unable to reconcile the new phenomena with their own prior experience or conceptions. There is no need to describe how rare this class must necessarily be, for every one who has eyes sees how near the passions and the prejudices of the human being lie to each other. These are the few who unite the two great virtues of earnestly studying the facts, and keeping their temper, composure and cheerfulness through whatever perplexity their inquiry may involve. It is remarkable that while the world is echoing all round and incessantly with the praise of the life of the man spent in following truth wherever it may lead, the world is always resounding also with the angry passions of men who resent all opinions which are not their own, and denounce with fury or with malice any countenance given to mere proposals to inquire in certain directions which they think proper to reprobate. Not only was it horrible blasphemy in Galileo to think as he did of the motion of the earth, but in his friends to look through his glass at the stars.
This Salem story is indeed shocking in every view--to our pride as rational beings, to our sympathy as human beings, to our faith as Christians, to our complacency as children of the Reformation. It is so shocking that some of us may regret that the details have been revived with such an abundance of evidence. But this is no matter of regret, but rather of congratulation, if we have not outgrown the need of admonition from the past. How does that consideration stand?
At the end of nearly three centuries we find ourselves relieved of a heavy burden of fear and care about the perpetual and unbounded malice of Satan and his agents. Witchcraft has ceased to be one of the gravest curses of the human lot. We have parted with one after another of the fetish or conjectural persuasions about our relations with the world of spirit or mind, regarded as in direct opposition to the world of matter. By a succession of discoveries we have been led to an essentially different view of life and thought from any dreamed of before the new birth of science; and at this day, and in our own metropolis, we have Sir Henry Holland telling us how certain treatment of this or that department of the nervous system will generate this or that state of belief and experience, as well as sensation. We have Dr. Carpenter disclosing facts of incalculable significance about brain-action without consciousness, and other vital mysteries. We have Dr. Maudsley showing, in the cells of the lunatic asylum, not only the very realm of Satan, as our fathers would have thought, but the discovery that it is not Satan, after all, that makes the havoc, but our own ignorance which has seduced us into a blasphemous superstition, instead of inciting us to the study of ourselves. And these are not all our teachers. Amid the conflict of phenomena of the human mind and body, we have arrived now at the express controversy of Psychology against Physiology. Beyond the mere statement of the fact we have scarcely advanced a step. The first can not be, with any accuracy, called a science at all, and the other is in little more than a rudimentary state; but it is no small gain to have arrived at some conception of the nature of the problem set before us, and at some liberty of hypothesis as to its conditions. In brief, and in the plainest terms, while there is still a multitude deluding and disporting itself with a false hypothesis about certain mysteries of the human mind, and claiming to have explained the marvels of Spiritualism by making an objective world of their own subjective experience, the scientific physiologists [those especially who are true phrenologists] are proceeding, by observation and experiment, to penetrate more and more secrets of our intellectual and moral life.