Locke and Sydenham / [Anon].

  • John Brown
Date:
[1850]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Locke and Sydenham / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    have been appropriated, and vitally adopted, by the mind, and which, to use Bacon’s strong words, have been drenched in flesh and blood,” have been turned in succum et sanguinem for man’s mind, any more than his body, cannot live on mere elementary substances; he must have fat, albumen, and sugar; he can make nothing of their elements, bare carbon, azote, or hydrogen. And more than this, as we have said, he must digest and disintegrate his food before it can be of any use to him. In this view, as in another and a higher, we may use the sacred words,—“ That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die: except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit for as it is a law of vegetable life, that a seed does not begin to pass into a new form, does not begin to grow into a plant, until its nature is changed, and its original condition is broken up, until it “ dies ” in giving birth to something better,—so is it with scientific truth, taken into or planted in the mind—it must die, else it abides alone—it does not germinate. Had Plato lived now, he might justly have said, ^^particulars are infinite.” Facts, as such, are merely so many units, and are often rather an encumbrance to the practical man than otherwise. These middle propositions ” stand midway between the facts in their infinity and speculative truth in its abstract inertness; they take from both what they need, and they form a tertium quid, upon which the mind can act practically, and reason upon in practice, and form rules of action. Sydenham, Hippocrates, Abernethy, Pott, Hunter, Baillie, Abercrombie, and such like, among physicians, are great in the region of the middle pro- positionsT They selected their particulars—their instances, and they made their higher generalities come down, they appropriated them, and turned them into blood, bone, and sinew. The great problem in the education of young men for medicine in our times, is to know how to make the infinity of particulars, the together with as much of the speculative propositions as comprises the justification of those rules. Art selects and arranges the truths of science in the most convenient order for practice, instead of the order most convenient for thought—science follow¬ ing one cause to its various effects, while art traces one effect to its multiplied and diversified causes and conditions. There is need of a set of Intermediate scientific truths^ derived from the higher generalities of science^ and destined to serve as the gene- ralia or first principles of art. The art proposes for itself an end to be gained, de¬ fines the end, and hands it over to science. Science receives it, studies it as a phenomenon or effect, and, having investigated its causes and conditions, sends it back to Art, with a rationale of its cause or causes, but nothing more. Art then examines their combinations, and according as any of them are or are not in human power, or within the scope of its particular end, pronounces upon their utility, and forms a rule of action. The rules of art do not attempt to comprise more conditions than require to he attended to in ordinary cases, and therefore are always imperfect.
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