Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/54

 so far as it connects the facts with such physiological and pathological principles as are already established; or, as it can succeed in deducing other principles from the facts supplied. In both respects much caution is necessary, especially in the latter, the tendency to generalise from insufficient data, so prevalent in speculative minds, requiring to be carefully watched, and rigidly restrained within its legitimate bounds.

It can hardly be but that the modes of investigating disease ordinarily followed, labour under some radical errors or defects, else the researches of ages, pursued, as they have been, with exemplary diligence, and, in many splendid instances, by minds of the first order of intellect, must, ere this, have rendered our knowledge of the nature and treatment of disease more certain and more complete. Further efforts are required, and better modes seem greatly needed. The present essay makes no presumptuous pretension to supplying this want, it being only a very humble attempt to point out some defects which impede the advancement of useful knowledge, and to suggest some improvements by which greater accuracy, both in the observation of morbid phenomena, and in the adaptation of remedies, may be attained.

It is by all agreed, that of medicine as of all natural science, facts are the foundation. The term is imposing, and apt to gain, for whatever is so denominated, an unreflecting belief. It seems to imply something obvious, tangible, which cannot mislead, and opposed to which all reasoning is fruitless; a persuasion which is embodied in the