Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/47

 GALEN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 43

‘ Come and see for yourselves ’ was his constant cry. ' A thousand times,’ he says, ‘ I have demonstrated by dis- section that the cords in the heart called nerves by Aristotle are not nerves and have no connexion with nerves.’ Doubt- less, in meeting the speculations of the philosophers, he often fell into the weakness of answering a fool according to his folly. At the special request of his friends, he says, he followed the philosophers into their own field and showed that he could spin out logic and quote poetry with the best of them. But I must try and give some idea of the strange intellectual atmosphere in which Galen upheld so manfully the standard of scientific truth. The followers of Chrysippus, a Stoic philosopher, are, says Galen, not ashamed to assert that when we wish to indicate emphati- cally ‘ I myself’ we lay the hand upon the heart or nod the head downwards, pointing to the chest, whence it follows that the heart is the principal seat of the soul 1. But, says Galen sarcastically, some persons with the same intention lay their hand upon the forehead or the nose, which parts might as well be the seat of the soul — and so on. Chrysippus himself, whose words are quoted, had a still more extraordinary argument. He said that, when we utter the word ey<o to indicate our own personality, in pronouncing the first syllable e (ay) we protrude the lower lip downwards, pointing to the heart as the seat of our personality, and this is immediately followed by the last syllable ; whereas in the word enelvos (he) another syllable is interposed, and so apparently the significance of the first syllable is lost ! Of this portentous nonsense it is very mild of Galen to say that it is not even a probable or a rhetorical or a sophistical argument, much less a scientific one 2.

The Stoics, according to Galen, were more difficult to deal with than the Peripatetics, because the latter, though they would not dissect, did know how to reason ; but the Stoics were perfectly ignorant of the right method of

1 De Placitis, lib. ii. cap. a ; Kuhn, v. p. 216.

a Ibid. ; Kuhn, v. p. 215.