204 ON THOUGHT IN MEDICINE. 



hard and clear light of facts, and must give up the notion 

 of lulling himself in agreeable illusions. 



I rejoice, therefore, that I can once more address 

 an assembly consisting almost exclusively of medical 

 men who have gone through the same school. Medicine 

 was once the intellectual home in which I grew up, and 

 even the emigrant best understands and is best under- 

 stood by his native land. 



If I am called upon to designate in one word the 

 fundamental error of that former time, I should be in- 

 clined to say that it pursued a false ideal of science in 

 a one-sided and erroneous reverence for the deductive 

 method. Medicine, it is true, was not the only science 

 which was involved in this error, but in no other 

 science have the consequences been so glaring, or have 

 so hindered progress, as in medicine. The history of 

 this science claims, therefore, a special interest in the 

 history of the development of the human mind. None 

 other is, perhaps, more fitted to show that a true 

 criticism of the sources of cognition is also prac- 

 tically an exceedingly important object of true philo- 

 sophy. 



The proud word of Hippokrates, 



irjrpot; <f)t\6(TO(f)O iaoQeoQ, 



6 Godlike is the physician who is a philosopher,' served, 

 as it were, as a banner of the old deductive medicine. 

 We may admit this if only we once agree what we 



