418 FALLACIES. 



We find Tournefort busily engaged in testing every 

 vegetable juice, in order to discover in it some traces 

 of an acid or alkaline ingredient, which might confer 

 upon it medicinal activity. The fatal errors into 

 which such an hypothesis was liable to betray the 

 practitioner, receive an awful illustration in the history 

 of the memorable fever that raged at Leyden in the 

 year 1699, and which consigned two-thirds of the 

 population of that city to an untimely grave ; an event 

 which in a great measure depended upon the Pro- 

 fessor Sylvius de la Boe, who having just embraced 

 the chemical doctrines of Van Helmont, assigned the 

 origin of the distemper to a prevailing acid, and 

 declared that its cure could alone be effected by the 

 copious administration of absorbent and testaceous 

 medicines*." John Brown, the author of the famous 

 Brunonian Theory, " generalized diseases, and 

 brought all within the compass of two grand classes, 

 those of increased and diminished excitement;" and 

 maintained "that every agent which could operate on 

 the human body was a stimulant, having an identity 

 of action, and differing only in the degree of its force; 

 so that according to his views the lancet and the 

 brandy bottle were but the opposite extremes of one 

 and the same class t." 



These aberrations in medical theory have their 

 exact parallels in politics. All the doctrines which 

 ascribe absolute goodness to particular forms of 

 government, particular social arrangements, and even 

 to particular modes of education, without reference 

 to the state of civilization and the various distin- 

 guishing characters of the society for which they are 

 intended, are open to the same objection that of 



Pharmacologia, pp. 39, 40. t Hid., p. 43. 



