Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London on Thursday, October 2, 1828
In no long time, the dominion of error was extended by the pleasure arising from the indulgence of fancy compared with the labour of exercising the other faculties; by vanity also, and the natural love of what is wonderful. Men were not wanting who boldly assumed a peculiar insight into the nature and in?uences of unknown powers; and although, more than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates left the vain speculations of the philosophers who aspired to be pa thologists without the lights of anatomy and physiology, and looked at the actual effects and progress of disease; although he gathered up the scattered knowledge of his time, arranged it, and exceedingly enriched it by his own acute and exact observation his labours were repeatedly coun teracted, and physio was again and again corrupted, and its very profession made contemptible in after ages, by the sophists of Greece, by the scholastic declaimers of Alex andria, and by numerous speculative men in various coun tries and of various periods, who found it easier and more agreeable to adopt the splendid reveries of men of genius, than to examine and judge for themselves. Thus we see that opinions were sometimes taken up upon trust, and that doubts and cavils were sometimes raised without reason or wisdom; and in both cases facts disregarded, loose analo gies pursued, the distinctions of diseases neglected, the effects of medicines confounded, imaginary qualities ascribed to various insignificant substances on the slightest grounds; - and thus too we trace, from age to age, a long succession, interchange, and implication of ingenious theories, each raised ou, or formed out of, the ruins of its predecessor, and each in turn thrown down to furnish materials, or form an unsound basis for the next.
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