Much of history is a record of the
mishaps of truths which have struggled to the birth, only to die or else
to wither in premature decay. Or the germ may be dormant for centuries,
awaiting the fullness of time.
Secondly, all scientific truth is conditioned by the state of knowledge
at the time of its announcement. Thus, at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, the science of optics and mechanical appliances had
not made possible (so far as the human mind was concerned) the existence
of blood capillaries and blood corpuscles. Jenner could not have
added to his "Inquiry" a study on immunity; Sir William Perkin and the
chemists made Koch technique possible; Pasteur gave the conditions that
produced Lister; Davy and others furnished the preliminaries necessary
for anaesthesia. Everywhere we find this filiation, one event following
the other in orderly sequence--"Mind begets mind," as Harvey (De
Generatione) says; "opinion is the source of opinion. Democritus with
his atoms, and Eudoxus with his chief good which he placed in pleasure,
impregnated Epicurus; the four elements of Empedocles, Aristotle;
the doctrines of the ancient Thebans, Pythagoras and Plato; geometry,
Euclid."(2)
(2) Works of William Harvey, translated by Robert Willis, London,
1847, p.
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