GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 



reasoning on the data of very clever vivisec- 

 tion. In it Galen also is a philosopher; and 

 offers the reader much a priori reasoning and 

 sheer intellectual construction. He is a Greek, 

 in love with logic, with dialectic, with reason- 

 ing upon hypotheses. For him, intelligent 

 people are " those who understand the conse- 

 quences of their hypotheses " ; whereas we 

 should be more apt to speak of " those who 

 know what they are talking about." 



Galen is under the necessity of finding names 

 and categories for his thinking. Sometimes 

 with him to formulate a statement, devise a 

 concept, give a satisfactory name, is his near- 

 est approach to an explanation, almost equiva- 

 lent to understanding a phenomenon or process. 

 Much that he says of the three powers of gene- 

 sis, growth, and nutrition are his verbally satis- 

 fying statements of what was, and still is, es- 

 sentially unknown. Such statements are sops 

 to the insatiate reasoning mind. Galen makes 

 them such as seem to him to ^' save the phenom- 

 ena " in each case, and also so that they will 

 dovetail; for he is always a system-builder. 

 Had he known something of chemistry, he 

 would have made his statements such as would 

 " save " other recondite phenomena. His more 



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