METHODS OF PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH 7 



beings. The primitive worship of the early races and the know- 

 ledge associated with it may be regarded as an indivisible whole, 

 from which, in the course of the hundreds and thousands of years, 

 theological, philosophical, scientific, and medical conceptions gradu- 

 ally and slowly have been crystallised out as independent groups 

 of ideas. 



The early notions of life were very naive and crude. All that moved 

 was living and was endowed with mind. The property of motion 

 was the criterion of life. Wind, water, fire and stars were personi- 

 fied. Meteorites which moved through the air, called " bsetyli," 

 were regarded by the Phoenicians as endowed with mind, and 

 were believed to be healing, while Susruta, the author of the 

 Yajurveda, the most ancient Indian work upon the art of healing, 

 represented all motile bodies as living, in distinction from non- 

 motile, or lifeless, bodies. The art of healing, which was almost 

 wholly a doctrine of drugs, and in primitive ages was developed 

 especially upon the Pontus, where witchcraft flourished and where 

 Hecate was reverenced, was crudely empirical, was in league with 

 magic and mystery, and wholly lacked a physiological basis. 



In these earliest times only one class of phenomena received 

 detailed consideration, namely, the higher psychical phenomena, 

 which reveal man's life most directly to himself. A doctrine of 

 the mind was developed even in ancient Egypt, probably under 

 Indian influence, which had for its basis the dualism of body and 

 mind, and reached its culmination in the idea of the passage of the 

 mind after the death of the body into other bodies. Later, this 

 notion was transplanted to Greece by the Greek philosophers, 

 especially Pythagoras. In general, from the earliest times onward, 

 the phenomena of mental life served as a peculiar stimulus for 

 priests and philosophers, the earliest theorisers, and in antiquity, 

 of all fields of investigation, psychology was cultivated the most. 



While physiological notions were scarcely influenced by medicine 

 until long after Hippocrates, in Greece they were enriched in a 

 significant manner by the first blooming of philosophy as a distinct 

 discipline independent of the priesthood. The oldest Greek 

 philosophers, the Ionic " physiologists," the Eleatics, as well as the 

 Atomists and the independent thinkers of the same time, whose 

 aim was the development of a cosmology, were forced in the pursuit 

 of this aim to reflect upon the origin of living nature. Whatever 

 judgment may be passed upon the unbridled character of the specu- 

 lations of these ancient thinkers, the correctness of their notions 

 regarding many of the phenomena of life will always remain a very 

 surprising fact. Among many of these early philosophers it is 

 singular to meet with ideas which, after more than two thousand 

 years, have again become current and are reckoned among the most 

 important foundations of the present science of life. This is par- 

 ticularly true of opinions concerning the origin and development of 



