"The story about Galileo--which seems to have been either a joke made against him, or by him--illustrates this. _Nature abhors a vacuum_ was the explanation of the water rising in a pump: but they found that the water would not rise more than 32 feet. They asked for explanation: what does the satirist make the schoolmen say? That the stoppage is _not_ a fact, because nature abhors a vacuum? No! but that the principle should be that nature abhors a vacuum as far as 32 feet. And this is what would have been done. "There are still among us both priests and physicians who would have belonged, had they lived three or four centuries ago, to the glorious band of whom I have spoken, the majority of the intelligent, working well for mankind out of the professional pursuit. But we have a great many who have helped to abase their classes. Go where we may, we find specimens of the lower orders of the ministry of religion and the ministry of health showing themselves smaller than the small of other pursuits. And how is this? First, because each profession is entered upon a mere working smack of its knowledge, without any depth of education, general or professional. Not that this is the whole explanation, nor in itself objectionable: the great mass of the world must be tended, soul and body, by those who are neither Hookers[345] nor Harveys[346]: let such persons not venture _ultra crepidam_, and they are useful and respectable. But, secondly, there is a vast upheaving of thought from the depths of commonplace learning. I am a clergyman! Sir! I am a medical man! Sir! and forthwith the nature of things is picked to pieces, and there is a race, with the last the winner, between Philosophy mounted on Folly's donkey, and Folly mounted on Philosophy's donkey. How fortunate {202} it is for Law that her battles are fought by politicians in the Houses of Parliament. Not that it is better done: but then _politics_ bears the blame."