Volume 1

Illustrations of the influence of the mind upon the body in health and disease : designed to elucidate the action of the imagination / by Daniel Hack Tuke.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of the influence of the mind upon the body in health and disease : designed to elucidate the action of the imagination / by Daniel Hack Tuke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    traversed, and their application carried out to their furthest possible limits before we go in quest of others. At the same time nothing can be more beside the inten- tion of the writer than to deny that wider laws or a larger circle of phenomena than he has hitherto grasped may exist, and may still be discovered. Dogmatic incredulity may betoken ignorance, not knowledge, as in the case of a countryman I once saw at the British Museum, who, when shown a huge meteoric stone and told it had fallen on the earth from the sky, said he would never believe that. In a similar spirit and from a like cause we too may “ give way to peremptory fits of asseveration/’ against which Lord Bacon warns ns, who cautions us also “ not to usurp a kind of dictature in science.” There is such a thing as a scientific snob. He it is who is quite certain that he has fathomed the depth of the great ocean of knowledge, and that he can gauge the spheres with the measure which he carries in his own pocket. It consists, however, with the modest sense of limited knowledge, which men of science ought to possess, to subject all asserted and apparent facts when they are at variance with ordinary experience to the most rigorous tests, and when demonstrated, to endeavour to show that they form no real exception to hitherto ascertained laws, although they may transcend them. It remains only to express the great obligation under which I lie to Mr Victor Horsley, F.R.C.S., of London,
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