s
great discovery of a fixed sun, and the earth wheeling round
that star, was his own; others had certainly observed it; yet
the invention was still Copernican: for that great genius
alone corrected, extended, and gave perfection to a hint, till
it expanded to a system.

So gradual have often been the great inventions of genius.
What others _conjectured_, and some _discovered_, Harvey
_demonstrated_. The fate of Harvey's discovery is a curious
instance of that patience and fortitude which genius must too
often exert in respect to itself. Though Harvey lived to his
eightieth year, he hardly witnessed his great discovery
established before he died; and it has been said, that he was
the only one of his contemporaries who lived to see it in some
repute. No physician adopted it; and when it got into vogue,
they then disputed whether he was the inventor! Sir William
Temple denied not only the discovery, but the doctrine of the
Circulation of the Blood. "Sense can hardly allow it; which,"
says he, "in this dispute must be satisfied as well as reason,
before mankind will concur."

[275] Stubbe has an eloquent passage, which describes the philosophy
of science. The new Experimental School had perhaps too wholly
rejected some virtues of the old one; the cultivation of the
human understanding, as well as the mere observation on the
facts that they collected; an error which has not been
entirely removed.

"That art of reasoning by which the prudent are discriminated
from fools, which methodiseth and facilitates our discourses,
which informs us of the validity of consequences and the
probability of arguments, and manifests the fallacies of
impostors; that art which gives life to solid eloquence, and
which renders Statesmen, Divines, Physicians, and Lawyers
accomplished; how is this cried down and vilified by the
ignoramuses of these days! What contempt is there raised upon
the disputative Ethics of Aristotle and the Stoics; and those
moral instructions, which have produced the Alexanders and the
Ptolemies, the Pompeys and the Ciceroes, are now slighted in
comparison of _day-labouring_! Did we live at Sparta, where
the daily employments