William Harvey — "As art is a habit with reference to things to be done, so is science a habit in …"
As art is a habit with reference to things to be done, so is science a habit in respect to things to be known.
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"I have often wondered that the heart, though it be the chief seat of life, yet is not sensible of its own motion."
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About William Harvey (1578-1657)
English physician whose On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628) demonstrated blood circulation, overturning 1,400 years of Galenic medicine. Closely associated with Francis Bacon (his contemporary in the new English empiricism). For an intellectual contrast, see Galenic medicine, the 2nd-century Greek medical tradition (humors, blood-as-consumed-fuel) — Harvey calculated that the heart pumps more blood per hour than the body could possibly produce as fuel — a single quantitative observation that demolished the entire Galenic-Aristotelian medical worldview. The cleanest example in medical history of arithmetic disproving 14 centuries of authority.
Details
From 'De Generatione Animalium' (1651), Introduction. Distinguishing art as practical skill and science as theoretical knowledge.
Date: 1651
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Skill in making things comes from practiced habits of doing; knowledge of how things work comes from practiced habits of observing and reasoning. Just as a craftsman becomes expert through repeated action, a scientist becomes expert through disciplined, repeated inquiry. Mastery in either domain is not innate talent but cultivated through consistent, purposeful engagement over time.
Relevance to William Harvey
Harvey embodied this perfectly: his discovery of blood circulation arose from decades of systematic dissection, vivisection, and careful observation rather than armchair philosophy. He rejected Galenic dogma not through argument alone but through relentless empirical habit, measuring, repeating, and refining experiments on dozens of animal species across his entire career as a physician and anatomist.
The era
In early modern Europe, medicine was still largely Aristotelian and Galenic, relying on inherited textual authority rather than observation. The Scientific Revolution was dismantling this. Harvey's era saw Francis Bacon champion empiricism, Galileo reshape physics through experiment, and universities slowly accepting that knowledge required disciplined practice, not merely classical inheritance, making this distinction between art and science as cultivated habits genuinely radical.
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