On the Philosophy of Discovery, Chapters Historical and Critical. William Whewell
VI.
The Later Greeks.
Thus while Plato was disposed to seek the essence of our knowledge in Ideas alone, Aristotle, slighting this source of truth, looked to Experience as the beginning of Science; and he attempted to obtain, by division and deduction, all that Experience did not immediately supply. And thus, with these two great names, began that struggle of opposite opinions which has ever since that time agitated the speculative world, as men have urged the claims of Ideas or of Experience to our respect, and as alternately each of these elements of knowledge has been elevated above its due place, while the other has been unduly depressed. We shall see the successive turns of this balanced struggle in the remaining portions of this review.
But we may observe that practically the influence of Plato predominated rather than that of Aristotle, in the remaining part of the history of ancient philosophy. It was, indeed, an habitual subject of dispute among men of letters, whether the sources of true knowledge are to be found in the Senses or in the Mind; the Epicureans taking one side of this alternative, and the Academics another, while the Stoics in a certain manner included both elements in their view. But none of these sects showed their persuasion that the materials of knowledge were to be found in the domain of Sense, by seeking them there. No one appears to have thought of following the example of Aristotle, and gathering together a store of observed facts. We may except, perhaps, assertions belonging to some provinces of Natural History, which were collected by various writers: but in these, the mixed character of the statements, the want of discrimination in the estimate of evidence, the credulity and love of the marvellous which the authors for the most part displayed, showed that instead of improving upon the example of Aristotle, they were wandering further and further from the path of real knowledge. And while they thus collected, with so little judgment, such statements as offered themselves, it hardly appears to have occurred to any one to enlarge the stores of observation by the aid of experiment; and to learn what the laws of nature were, by trying what were their results in particular cases. They used no instruments for obtaining an insight into the constitution of the universe, except logical distinctions and discussions; and proceeded as if the phenomena familiar to their predecessors must contain all that was needed as a basis for natural philosophy. By thus contenting themselves with the facts which the earlier philosophers had contemplated, they were led also to confine themselves to the ideas which those philosophers had put forth. For all the most remarkable alternatives of hypothesis, so far as they could be constructed with a slight and common knowledge of phenomena, had been promulgated by the acute and profound thinkers who gave the first impulse to philosophy: and it was not given to man to add much to the original inventions of their minds till he had undergone anew a long discipline of observation, and of thought employed upon observation. Thus the later authors of the Greek Schools became little better than commentators on the earlier; and the commonplaces with which the different schools carried on their debates—the constantly recurring argument, with its known attendant answer—the distinctions drawn finer and finer and leading to nothing—render the speculations of those times a scholastic philosophy, in the same sense in which we employ the term when we speak of the labours of the middle ages. It will be understood that I now refer to that which is here my subject, the opinions concerning our knowledge of nature, and the methods in use for the purpose of obtaining such knowledge. Whether the moral speculations of the ancient world were of the same stationary kind, going their round in a limited circle, like their metaphysics and physics, must be considered on some other occasion.[33]
Mr. Grote, in his very interesting discussion of Socrates's teaching, notices also[34] the teaching of Hippocrates, which he conceives to have in one respect the same tendency as the philosophy of Socrates; namely, to turn away from the vague aggregate of doctrines and guesses which constituted the Physical Philosophy of that time, and to pursue instead a special and more practical course of inquiry: Hippocrates selecting Medicine and Socrates selecting Ethics. By this limitation of their subject, they avoided some of the errors of their predecessors. For, as Mr. Grote has also remarked, "the earlier speculators, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, the Pythagoreans, all had still present to their minds the vast and undivided problems which have been transmitted down from the old poets; bending their minds to the invention of some system which would explain them all at once, or assist the imagination in conceiving both how the Kosmos first began and how it continued to move on." There could be no better remedy for this ambitious error of the human mind than to have a definite subject of study, such as the diseases and the health of the human body. Accordingly, we see that the study of medicine did draw its cultivators away from this ancient but unprofitable field. Hippocrates[35] condemns those who, as Empedocles, set themselves to make out what man was from the beginning, how he began first to exist, and in what manner he was constructed. This is, he says, no part of medicine. In like manner he blames and refutes those who make some simple element, Hot, or Cold, or Moist, or Dry, the cause of diseases, and give medical precepts professing to be founded on this hypothesis.
These passages are marked by the prudence which practical study suggests to a calm and clear-sighted man. They can hardly be said to have opened the way to a Science of Medicine; for in the sense in which we here use the word Science, namely, a collection of general truths inferred from facts by successive discoverers, we have even yet no Science of Medicine. The question with regard to the number and nature of the Elements of which bodies are composed began to be agitated, as we have seen, at a very early period of Greek philosophy, and continued long to be regarded as a chief point of physiological doctrine. In Galen's work we have a treatise entitled, On the Elements according to Hippocrates; and the writer explains[36] that though Hippocrates has not written any work with the title On the Elements, yet that he has in his Treatise on the Nature of Man shown his opinion on that subject. That the doctrine of the Four Elements, Hot, Cold, Moist, Dry, subsisted long in the schools, we have evidence in Galen. He tells us[37] that when he was a student of nineteen years old a teacher urged this lore upon him, and regarded him as very contentious and perverse, because he offered objections to it. His account of the Dialogue between him and the teacher is curious. But in Hippocrates the doctrine of these four elements is replaced, in a great measure, by the doctrine of the Four Humours of which the human body is constituted; namely, Blood, Phlegm, Yellow Bile and Black Bile. Galen dwells with emphasis upon Hippocrates's proof that there must be more than one such element[38].
"What," he asks, "is the method of finding the Elements of bodies? There can, in my opinion, be no other than that which was introduced by Hippocrates; namely, we must inquire whether there be only one element, everywhere the same in kind, or whether there are more than one, various and unlike each other. And if the Element be not one only, but several, various and dissimilar, we must inquire in the second place, how many elements there are, and what, and of what kind they are, and how related in their association.
"Now that the First Element is not one only of which both our bodies and those of all other creatures were produced, Hippocrates shows from these considerations. And it is better first to put down his own expressions and then to expound them. 'I assert that if man consisted of one element only he could not fall sick; for there would be nothing which could derange his health, if he were all of one Element.'"
The doctrine of One Element did not prevail much after the time of Hippocrates: the doctrine of Four Elements continued, as I have said, long to hold possession of the Schools, but does not appear as an important part of the doctrine of Hippocrates. The doctrine of the Four Humours (Blood, Phlegm, Yellow Bile and Black Bile) is more peculiarly his, and long retained its place as a principle of physiological Science.
But we are here not so much concerned with his discoveries in medicine as with his views respecting the method of acquiring sound knowledge, and in this respect, as has been said, he recommends by his practice a prudent limitation of the field of inquiry, a rejection of wide, ambitious, general assertions, and a practical study of his proper field.
In ascribing these merits to Hippocrates's medical speculations as to the ethical speculations of his contemporary Socrates, we assign considerable philosophical value to Hippocrates, no less than to Socrates. These merits were at that time the great virtues of physical as well as of ethical philosophy.