SCIENCE AND HISTORY 587 



subtleties. For nearly two centuries they had the field to themselves, 

 ■vfhen 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 per- 

 son 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, Athenjeus of Cilicia, foimded the Pneu- 

 matists, 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 re- 

 peating the performance until either the original secret had been redis- 

 covered 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 



