been almost, if not altogether, the only recognized avenue to an intimate acquaintance with natural science. Especially has this been true away from the neighborhood of large cities or collegiate schools. The delicately organized youth, product, perhaps, of several generations of low-living and high-thinking, with a brain developed out of proportion to his body, with perceptions keenly alive to all that is strange, beautiful and poetic in nature, desiring not only to hold communion with her visible forms but to know her weird mysteries and hidden charms, sought that knowledge through the study of medicine. There he learned, or hoped to learn, what might be known of botany, chemistry, physiology, biology, and anatomy, both healthful and morbid; familiarizing himself with the beautiful and grotesque both in animal and vegetable life, the changes and conceits of each, the powers of good and evil, and the forms of grace and terror which reveal themselves to the inquisitive and courageous questioner of nature's ways. Then, perhaps, having learned all these and having furnished his brooding brain with much material for poetic fancies; having also, to some extent, gratified the desire to know, he turns, as in duty bound, to the practical side of his profession. And what does he find? Human misery in its most disagreeable forms; rheumatic, querulous, misshapen old age, diseased, filthy, peevish childhood; for himself, a life of anxious days and sleepless nights, with little to touch his higher nature by way of encouragement or compensation. And then, after a more or less protracted season of misery, he comes to the conclusion that he has mistaken his calling, and, yielding in the hopeless struggle, he gives up a profession which, with a more accurate self-knowledge, need never have been begun, and, if poor, betakes himself to teaching or to hand labor; or, if not poor, he turns perhaps to the solace of literature or of art and pursues his way with such success as the gods vouchsafe him. Men say of him that he has failed in his profession, and among a people who consider failure in a thing once undertaken as synonymous with every weakness and near akin to crime, this sentence of condemnation may drive him to a misanthropic grave. Such has been the history of many. But, let the hour come for the man, and you will find in this same delicate frame

and sensitive organization a strength of purpose, a high resolve, a moral courage which you might search for in vain among the brawny men of muscle. This stripling, who failed utterly in a humdrum life of ordinary and distasteful monotony will do and dare and, if need be, die for some abstract truth which seems to him vital, while the less sensitive, but more successful man, still succeeding, would think it better to wait until the world grew wiser before forcing upon it unpala

table theories.

When we consider his temperament we may, perhaps, understand what attracted this young poet to these new doctrines. They appealed to his imagination. This high standard of personal purity which took cognizance of the thoughts of the heart rather than the works of the hands. This human brotherhood, this kingdom of God on earth in men's hearts, all these were ideas which would have especial attraction for a nature like his. He might find the toil and annoyance of a daily medical practice irksome beyond endurance. It is prob able that he had already abandoned it and solaced himself with art, gaining thereby his traditional repute as painter, and yet he would be ready to undergo any hardship for an idea which had possessed him. As we have already said, such men are not rare. Every great crisis brings to light multitudes of them. Almost every small community can furnish examples.

That Luke ever practiced his profession of medicine does not appear, and is not probable beyond what was necessary to discover to himself his own unfitness for it. So far as appears, he never availed himself of his knowledge when he might naturally have been expected to do so. He had far more confidence in the supernatural powers of Paul, either in curing the bites of vipers or in treating the father of Publius for dysentery and fever, although his medical knowledge. comes out in the accurate description of the disease. His art, as I have already suggested, was probably a temporary resource from a disagreeable profession.

He was not of himself by nature a leader of men, but having found his leader, there was no further question. Clinging with all the enthusiasm of a poetic nature to one whose will should shape his way, he bound himself to the fortunes of

Paul, ready to follow to the death, if need be, wherever Paul led, and the idolized, ideal Christ beckoned the way.

We e may count it fortunate, if fortunate be not too trivial a word, that the great apostle to the Gentiles should have had such a follower and such a historian: and we shall, perhaps, find a new sympathy with Luke and a new light shed upon his life when we consider him as Physician, Painter, and Poetbut this last, first, and most of all.

ARTICLE X.-A POPULAR FALLACY.

SOME fallacies are very fascinating. Together with fact, the fanciful infuses our popular writing and thinking. On page 471 in the North American for May, we read these words: "One of the greatest of our contemporaneous philosophers has taught us that development proceeds from the indefinite to the definite, and from simplicity to complexity." Presumably, the accepted teaching of modern English physical science.

The opening words of the quotation that lead up to this dictum, are, in and of themselves, a sort of oblique fallacy. For, many have not been "taught" the particular lesson of this "contemporaneous philosopher." If from dullness we have failed to learn it, then we shall not mend our pace by assuming its validity. If from perversity, then we must be converted.

Standing alone, as the words do, in illustration of the particular theological point in question, they cannot be thought a garbled sentence by the present writer. They are used analogically, by the writer of the paper to which we refer, to strengthen the theological argument-with which we have no issue by means of a metaphysics of physical science with which we do take issue. Let us try the notions in this definite, indefinite dictum. Take its first clause, "that development proceeds from the indefinite to the definite," using the word "proceeds" genetically. When we strive to climb from the indefinite to the definite, we find no path. Indefiniteness gives no reason to conclude that out of it definiteness shall come. Indefiniteness equals nothing, and "out of nothing, nothing comes." Indefiniteness equals the void and nonexistent. The rules of any logic, formal or informal, hold us to that fact, that only the definite can precede and found the definite. If, for example, biology should show us any anteprotoplasm from the deepest sea-sounding, it could not be indefinite and unorganized. That it seems so, is in seeming only, not in reality. It is an illusion of sense, or assisted sense, call in never so many aids as it will. Metaphysical,

critical thinking detects the imposition at once.

The coal with

which the shipmaster ballasts his ship at Newcastle is thought not to be liable to so-called spontaneous combustion. But, when he arrives at Colon, he finds his coal afire. What shall he conclude, but that the coal, like all being, is conditioned, and not unconditioned, as to its ignition by other means than applied fire, as the eye of sense had hitherto supposed. Common sense, science aside, shows a definiteness where the indefinite and unconditioned were thought to hold. The coals needed other conditions which other shipmasters had never imposed, and latent fire became visible to the eye of sense. Much more, then, shall reason detect the definite and the manifestation of the definite under the seemingly chaotic, indefinite and ineffective, and that too without the dangers of empiricism. "It is insight we want, not eyesight," says true metaphysics.

Then, too, when we try to descend the path from the definite to the indefinite, we meet a statute of limitations. We violate the ruling of the law of the "sufficient reason" which says, "there must be a determining ground in the cause for the specific character of the effect." Neither shall we here get lost in the complex. What seems complex is only so in seeming. In it we shall find the simple by the same rule of applied reason. By what arrogant law of development shall matter so be governed in its change and becoming, as that it shall lose its 'determining ground," whether it seem to halt in the material, efficient, formal or final cause? "What are you making?" says the lad to the Yankee whittler. "You shall see!" says the whittler to the boy, meaning, you shall see by the eye of sense, eventually, what I see by the eye of reason, now. It was a definite basswood stick, as material cause, at starting, but, in the hands of the whittler, it has stopped, apparently, in the efficient cause. Nevertheless, while sense would cheat the boy, by the present, irregular, undefined shape of the stick, into thinking that definiteness has been lost in complexity; reason rescues him from that paralysis of perplexity, and, stimulated by the answer withheld, the boy already sees in his "mind's eye," the basswood whistle, or the figure-head for his boat. He knows the final cause, and has respect to it, practically, though he may not know it, philosophically. The fact is, things are not only what they seem, they are more than