Lettsomian lectures, on insanity / by Forbes Winslow.

  • Forbes Benignus Winslow
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lettsomian lectures, on insanity / by Forbes Winslow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    with any relation to the absolute incorporeal void ? Whether, if an angel were in vacuo, the void could still be termed perfect ? These, and similarly abstruse and absurd speculations, seriously occupied the patient attention of a few of the learned schoolmen and theologians of former times, and gave rise to the idea of the science of metaphysics being the art of talking grave nonsense upon subjects beyond the limits of the human understanding. We are not justified, however, in any wholesale condemnation of these apparently profitless and Quixotic speculations. May we not use the language of the founder of the Inductive Philosophy, and say of the ancient schoolmen, that, in seeking for brilliant impossibilities, they sometimes discovered useful realities. Bacon, when referring to the researches of the alchemists for the philosopher's stone, says, that they performed the office of the husbandman, who, in seeking for a hidden treasure, turned up the soil, and pulverized the earth, thereby rendering it better fitted for the purposes of vegetation. Although the schoolmen were baffled in their attempts to discover the essence of the soul, and to ascertain, with any degree of satisfaction to their own minds, the precise number of angelic spirits who could pirouette at the same instant upon the point of a needle, they nevertheless opened a path for the philosopher, amidst the dreary forest which he had to traverse, and pointed out to him the dangerous portions of his journey, in which they themselves had stumbled and fallen. Modern Metaphysics, and its sister science. Theology, hold the same relations to the rhapsodies of the schoolmen as modern chemistry does to the speculations of the alchemist. No right- thinking men would repudiate the study of modem chemistry on account of the obscure and apparently profitless researches of the alchemists: by parity of reasoning, are we justified in denouncing the serious and patient study of mental philosophy, on account of the scholastic jargon, nonentities, unmeaning generalities, and inanities, of some of the ancient metaphysicians ? In forming an estimate of the value of any branch of philo- sophical inquiry, we must be cautious how we apply the inter- rogatory, cui bono?—neither must we adopt as our model of imitation the mathematician who, refusing to admit that any advantage could result from the study of a science not directly related to his own favourite study, exclaimed, when recom- mended to read Milton's Paradise Lost, What does it prove ?
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