Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/597

Rh This doctrine does not stand alone as such an attempt. The “spirit” theory of disease has a like basis and purpose; it reaches from primitive medicine to Christian exorcism and beyond. The reference of epilepsy or other mental invasion to a foreign and malignant spirit is not unrelated to the notion of animal spirits coursing through the body and finding a local habitation in the ventricles—literally, breathing-spaces—of the brain. Again, the doctrine of signatures, in accordance with which red flowers were considered efficacious in the treatment of blood diseases and yellow ones in the treatment of jaundice, or “heart’s-ease” was prescribed for heart trouble, and walnuts for mental disorders (by virtue of the resemblance of their outer shell to the skull and of their convoluted kernels to the brain) illustrate the force of native analogy in cruder practises.

When notions of this order, instead of being carried along as the folk-lore products of primitive thought, assume a systematic form, they become more fantastic in the analogies employed as well as more remote from a corrective common sense. Astrology is the most ambitious of such efforts in both design and scope of application. The three persistent motives in this world-wide and world-old expression—a composite of primitive culture, superstitious survivals, and pseudo-scientific elaboration—seem to be the cure of disease, the reading of character, the fore-knowledge of the future and in all, the control of fate. The motives combine. Astrology aims to determine the character as well as the careers of men, to predict their liability to disease and its issues, and to prescribe the set of disposition—making one of jovial temperament if the hour of birth showed favorable relations to Jupiter, or gloomy (saturnine) if Saturn ruled the critical moment. These and related notions and systems form a vast background of belief, continuously influencing the views of character and its sources. Whether the causes or the signs of dispositions were regarded as resident in the fluids of the body, or in the stars and planets, or in the detailed contours of the features of the face and head—as in the later physiognomy, itself a revival of classic and popular lore—or with more modern but no less fanciful elaboration, in the “bumps” of phrenology, or again in the creases of the hand upon which palmistry specializes, there appears in all a common practical motive in the control of fate through insight or revelation, and a common quasi-logical attempt to establish its basis by reading the secret of its conditioning—the insignia of its dominion. The logic of the procedure, as judged by our standards, is of the feeblest, but these standards are the issue of many generations of experience, each critically testing the conclusions, revising and enlarging the data, of its predecessors. The stress of practise, we must bear in mind, is insistent. Men will apply what knowledge they have; they can not await its perfection. Ideals and systems support the intercourse with reality, but they also express the