Introductory lecture to the class of midwifery &c : in the Jefferson Medical College, delivered Wednesday, October 9, 1854 / by Charles D. Meigs.

  • Meigs, Charles D. (Charles Delucena), 1792-1869.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory lecture to the class of midwifery &c : in the Jefferson Medical College, delivered Wednesday, October 9, 1854 / by Charles D. Meigs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    intensified music, clear as the crystal fountain-—as if be would bathe his spirit in melodies ! If we may venture to call these happiness, what shall we say of knowledge, or how compute the bounds and limits of his happiness whose life is shined upon by the bright radiant beams of science, and sanctified by the purifying influences of wisdom. Oh, what an enlarged liberty is that man's, whose intellect follows the plummet that dives to the bottom amidst the ocean of stars and constella- tions, and nebulae of the firmament! What bliss for him whose soul gives back the reflection of the things and the incidents of the ages that are and those that are fled, and that is so replete with the intellectual images of all time, and all places, and all things, that it is become itself a cosmos I What a happiness to have even seen the man—how enviable his state I His years and gray hairs are but incentives to love and veneration. Of such a man, is it not true to say: Unto me men gave ear, and waited, and kept silence at my counsel. After my words, they spake not again ; and my speech dropped upon them. And they waited for me as for the rain ; and they opened their mouth wide as for the latter rain. The pleasures rise in the same ratio as the development of the psychical powers; and Oken has shown, in his zoological pro- gression of the sensuous faculties, that they regularly augment from the lowest to the highest being—man, the crown and glory of all; man alone being a moral creature, and capable of true happiness. If you would be happy, then, seek to know the earth and the world as God fashioned them upon the mould of the preformed Absolute—-the Divine Idea of them ; and, as all things that sub- sist are but the fixed, posited, material expressions of his thought, his will, his purpose as to them, the more we know them, the more do we comprehend the Divine Idea of them, and Him too, and ourselves. Let the scholar's soul become, as it were, a spiritual, intellectual reflection of the earth and the world, that through them he may discern himself, and his relations to his Maker and Father, and his fellow-man. A man of nature is but a man*brute, an intensified brute; but an educated man is disenthralled of the chains of prejudice and passion; he is supposed to become virtuous in proportion to the expansion of his sphere of intellection ; he is become free, indeed— but the ignorant is enslaved. The wicked are to be pitied. A wise man cannot be wicked. Wickedness is another name for igno-