ations
even after the same fashion as ourselves.[97]

. . . . . .

"I am by no means speaking of those purely arbitrary systems which we
are able at a glance to detect as chimeras that are being pretended to
us as realities, but I refer to the methods whereby people have set
themselves seriously to study nature. Even the experimental method
itself has been more fertile of error than of truth, for though it is
indeed the surest, yet is it no surer than the hand of him who uses it.
No matter how little we incline out of the straight path, we soon find
ourselves wandering in a sterile wilderness, where we can see but a few
obscure objects scattered sparsely; nevertheless we do violence to these
facts and to ourselves, and resemble them together on a conceit of
analogies and common properties amongst them. Then, passing and
repassing complaisantly over the tortuous path which we have ourselves
beaten, we deem the road a worn one, and though it leads no whither, the
world follows it, adopts it, and accepts its supposed consequences as
first principles. I could show this by laying bare the origin of that
which goes by the name of 'principle' in all the sciences, whether
abstract or natural. In the case of the former, the basis of principle
is abstraction--that is to say, one or more suppositions: in that of the
second, principles are but the consequences, better or worse, of the
methods which may have been followed. And to speak here of anatomy only,
did not he who first surmounted his natural repugnance and set himself
to work to open a human body--did he not believe that through going all
over it, dissecting it, dividing it into all its parts, he would soon
learn its structure, mechanism, and functions? But he found the task
greater than he had expected, and renouncing such pretensions, was fain
to content himself with a method--not for seeing and judging, but for
seeing after an orderly fashion. This method ... is still the sole
business of our ablest anatomists, but it is not science. It is the road
which should lead scienceward, and might perhaps have reached science
itself, if instead of walking ever on a single narrow path men had set
the anatomy of man and that of animals face to face with one another.
For, what real knowledge can be drawn from an isolated pursuit? Is not
the foundation of all science seen to consist in the comparison which
the human mind can draw between different objects in the matter of their