PHYSICIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS. 615 



ever, an exceptionally healthy people, owing to their fondness for out- 

 door life. This is demonstrated by the rapidity with which they re- 

 covered from repeated disasters. Once in a while their capital was 

 invaded by a contagious disorder, then all who could do so left it until 

 the scourge had spent its force, when affairs resumed their natural 

 channel. In fact this was the usual course everywhere until very 

 recently, when the real nature of such diseases was discovered. The 

 ancient Romans were also a singularly hard-headed and practical 

 people; consequently they were almost entirely free from the long list 

 of complaints that are more or less due to the uncontrolled or uncon- 

 trollable imagination. Shortly after the Punic wars, but especially 

 under the empire when luxurious habits due to the influx of wealth 

 from the east had debilitated the naturally robust constitutions of the 

 higher classes, nervous disorders, along with many others, were in- 

 evitable. Then quacks, charlatans, medicasters, soothsayers, magicians, 

 astrologers and what not found a ready market for their wares. They 

 played upon the credulity of the populace and preyed upon their purses 

 because there was money in both the playing and the preying. No 

 small portion of them probably were shrewd enough to disguise some 

 real medical knowledge under a mass of hocus pocus in order to in- 

 fluence the imaginations of their patients. Well might Ovid say as 

 others had said before him — and since, too — mwidus vult decipi (people 

 like to be deluded). Physicians still give to their patients who insist 

 ' on taking something ' bread pills, colored water and other equally 

 potent or impotent remedies. It would be manifestly unfair to charge 

 a physician with dishonesty because he practises a harmless ruse upon 

 a patient who can be helped in no other way so easily. 



" Dismissing faith in the confused creeds of the heathen world, he 

 reposed the greatest faith in the power of human wisdom. He did 

 not know (perhaps no one in that age distinctly did) the limits which 

 nature imposes on our discoveries. Seeing that the higher we mount 

 in knowledge the more wonders we behold, he imagined that nature not 

 only worked miracles in her ordinary course, but that she might, by 

 the cabala of some master soul, be diverted from that course itself. 

 Thus he pursued science across her appointed boundaries into the land 

 of perplexity and shadow. Prom the truths of astronomy he wandered 

 into astrological fallacy: from the secrets of chemistry he passed into 

 the spectral labyrinth of magic; and he who could be skeptical as to 

 the power of the gods was credulously superstitious as to the power 

 of man." Such are the thoughts that Bulwer-Lytton, in the Last 

 Days of Pompeii, puts into the mind of one of his characters, the Egypt- 

 ian Arbaces. The reasoning by which such men justified the employ- 

 ment of their superior knowledge and insight to dupe the credulous 

 was half philosophy, half knavery. If a man is the possessor of p )wer 



