206 ON THOUGHT IN MEDICINE. 



how in periods of youthful development, such a one- 

 sided over-estimate of thought could be arrived at. 

 The superiority of man over animals, of the scholar 

 over the barbarian, depends upon thinking ; sensation, 

 feeling, perception, on the contrary, he shares with his 

 lower fellow-creatures, and in acuteness of the senses 

 many of these are even superior to him. That man 

 strives to develop his thinking faculty to the utmost 

 is a problem on the solution of which the feeling of 

 his own dignity, as well as of his own practical power, 

 depends ; and it is a natural error to have considered 

 unimportant the dowry of mental capacities which 

 Nature had given to animals, and to have believed that 

 thought could be liberated from its natural basis, 

 observation and perception, to begin its Icarian flight 

 of metaphysical speculation. 



It is, in fact, no easy problem to ascertain com- 

 pletely the origins of our knowledge. An enormous 

 amount is transmitted by speech and writing. This 

 power which man possesses of gathering together the 

 stores of knowledge of generations, is the chief reason 

 of his superiority over the animal, who is restricted 

 to an inherited blind instinct and to its individual 

 experience. But all transmitted knowledge is handed 

 on already formed; whence the reporter has derived 

 it, or how much criticism he has bestowed upon it, 

 can seldom be made out, especially if the tradition has 



