Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/3



search after truth has in every age been regarded as the most difficult, and often as the most fruitless of pursuits, for it has never been successful in revealing absolute truth, or that which is involved in and essential to any branch of knowledge. While it has demonstrated the honesty of some of the searchers and the perversity of others, it has resulted in the failure of all. Undoubtedly the cause of this failure has mainly been that no fact or proposition in natural science can be expressed in such precise terms as mathematicians use, and which, being abstract and clearly defined, are universally accepted at the same value in every age and place. But in the sciences of observation neither the facts nor their interpretation are definite, and the more complex a branch of knowledge is, the less uniform are the conclusions respecting it.

I leave out of this comparison the science of theology, the most anciently cultivated of all sciences, and which has always possessed the highest interest for the human mind. But since it relates to subjects which are in the province of faith rather than of reason, agreement in regard to it can never be reached by men who are free to judge and to act upon their judgments. It is far otherwise with natural and physical laws. Comparatively few are the differences of judgment among astronomers, but those which divide chemists and physicists are numerous; still more dissidents are to be met with among those who deal with living matter, with structure and function, normal and abnormal—that is to say, with physiology and pathology. But even their discordant opinions are slight compared with those that beset therapeutics.