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Portrait of William Harvey
The Invisible Philosophers
BY EDMUND GOSSE
IN the pursuit of pure knowledge there is little to gratify the vanity of an individual. That reverence for the precursors, which we meet with in the history of the arts and of literature, does not occur in the history of science. A Cædmon in poetry, a Palestrina in music, a Cimabue in painting, is interesting and attractive in his very incompleteness; the freshness of his genius fascinates our attention, and we do not ask whether he was not presently superseded. But the collective labor of creating knowledge is incessant, and it occupies successive generations of laborers, who work and die and are forgotten. They clear a little space in the jungle; they try false paths and scale useless heights. Others follow them with new developments and fresh formulas, and these clear another little space. The pioneers are buried in the forest, and we build no memorials to them. The following pages are intended to form a very modest monument to a group of men whose work is almost entirely forgotten, but without whose admirable initiative there might have been in England no Newton and no Darwin.
It had been Bacon who discovered that science had proceeded along an entirely false track, and that on natural history—that is to say, on the close observation of objects—alone could be laid the firm foundations of a pure natural philosophy. The facts of the world were to be collected, and laws evolved from a multitude of instances. The Baconian injunction had been "to take all that comes rather
