Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/134

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE reasoning on the data of very clever vivisec- tion. In it Galen also is a philosopher; and offers the reader much a priori reasoning and sheer intellectual construction. He is a Greek, in love with logic, with dialectic, with reason- ing upon hypotheses. For him, intelligent people are " those who understand the conse- quences of their hypotheses " ; whereas we should be more apt to speak of " those who know what they are talking about." Galen is under the necessity of finding names and categories for his thinking. Sometimes with him to formulate a statement, devise a concept, give a satisfactory name, is his near- est approach to an explanation, almost equiva- lent to understanding a phenomenon or process. Much that he says of the three powers of gene- sis, growth, and nutrition are his verbally satis- fying statements of what was, and still is, es- sentially unknown. Such statements are sops to the insatiate reasoning mind. Galen makes them such as seem to him to ^' save the phenom- ena " in each case, and also so that they will dovetail; for he is always a system-builder. Had he known something of chemistry, he would have made his statements such as would " save " other recondite phenomena. His more [112]