Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/591

Rh subtleties. For nearly two centuries they had the field to themselves, when the inevitable reaction came and the Empirical school arose. This was in some measure a return to first principles. Some centuries later appeared Themison of Laodicea, who was the most conspicuous person among the disciples of the Methodical school. He endeavored to trace all diseases to a few types and to find a cure for each type. Here was evidently something more than a mere glimpse of the real state of the case. His contemporary, Athenæus of Cilicia, founded the Pneumatists, whose adherents assumed the existence of an air-like substance in the human body, to which its condition both, in health and disease was due. Agatinus of Sparta, the father of the Eclectic school, came a little later. The circle of medical theory was now complete. Galen, at a subsequent period, compiled a sort of medical encyclopedia, and although he was both a careful observer and a profound thinker he could not free himself entirely from the prejudices of his age. About a thousand years later several physicians of note appeared among the Saracens and the Jews; but their skill was due rather to sanity of judgment than to knowledge of the healing art. All the sciences and most of the arts have every now and then found themselves in a blind-alley where no further progress was possible until some hitherto unknown way out had been discovered. Medical knowledge and skill had probably exploited their opportunities to the utmost seventeen or eighteen centuries ago. There was no advance possible until the microscope had reached a high degree of excellence. The progress of chemistry had also an important bearing on the healing art. An air-ship sufficiently powerful to carry a man has been desiderated ever since Daedalus made his famous flight from Crete to Italy. Albeit, there seemed to be no possibility of repeating the performance until either the original secret had been rediscovered or some fuel lighter than any known a generation ago. Michael Faraday declared that "there is not a law under which any part of the universe is governed that does not come into play in the phenomena of the chemical history of a candle."

The history of human thought as distinguished from the history of human acts is at bottom a quest for the fundamental principles by which the cosmos is governed. "Philosophy," says Schwegler, "deals with the totality of experience under the form of an organic system in harmony with the laws of thought." But as the totality of experience is not the same to-day that it was yesterday, nor will it be the same to-morrow that it is to-day, we are always getting a little nearer to a goal which can never be reached. The history of philosophy is for the most part the history of efforts to systematize knowledge from the observation of a comparatively small number of facts. The mistakes into which such a method leads is now so fully recognized by historians of human actions that they refuse to formulate a philosophy of history. They assure us