[Published in advance of the Transactions of the Society.]
Your committee are not aware of any special progress in medicine during the year that has just closed, though the labors of many eminent men of the profession have doubtless resulted in healthful growth.
Philosophers entertain different views of growth. One school believes in a continuous development resulting from natural and fixed laws; another that all great, time-enduring monuments are the result of special inspiration.
Spencer says God in Nature, before all things, in all things, bringing forth by immutable law order, progress, growth.
Carlyle beheld Him above Nature, inspiring anew the human soul, and thus promoting progress.
To the one the event made the man; to the other, man the event. Both are in a measure correct.
The perception of truth, the conception of a great event, by an earnest soul gives the seeming super-natural power that enables one man