is laid upon the physician; if, on the other hand, he feels
better, nature is extolled, and the physician reaps no praise."
The essence of this has been repeated in rhyme and prose by
writers in every age and country, but the "father of medicine"
cautions physicians against allowing it to influence their
attitude towards their profession.



VIII. POST-SOCRATIC SCIENCE AT ATHENS--PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND
THEOPHRASTUS

Doubtless it has been noticed that our earlier scientists were as
far removed as possible from the limitations of specialism. In
point of fact, in this early day, knowledge had not been
classified as it came to be later on. The philosopher was, as his
name implied, a lover of knowledge, and he did not find it beyond
the reach of his capacity to apply himself to all departments of
the field of human investigation. It is nothing strange to
discover that Anaximander and the Pythagoreans and Anaxagoras
have propounded theories regarding the structure of the cosmos,
the origin and development of animals and man, and the nature of
matter itself. Nowadays, so enormously involved has become the
mass of mere facts regarding each of these departments of
knowledge that no one man has the temerity to attempt to master
them all. But it was different in those days of beginnings. Then
the methods of observation were still crude, and it was quite the
custom for a thinker of forceful personality to find an eager
following among disciples who never thought of putting his
theories to the test of experiment. The great lesson that true
science in the last resort depends upon observation and
measurement, upon compass and balance, had not yet been learned,
though here and there a thinker like Anaxagoras had gained an
inkling of it.

For the moment, indeed, there in Attica, which was now, thanks to
that outburst of Periclean culture, the centre of the world's
civilization, the trend of thought was to take quite another
direction. The very year which saw the birth of Democritus at
Abdera, and of Hippocrates, marked also the birth, at Athens, of
another remarkable man, whose influence it would scarcely be
possible to over-estimate. This man was Socrates. The main facts
of his history are familiar to every one. It will be recalled
that Socrates spent his entire life in Athens, mingling
everywhere with the populace; haranguing, so the tradition goes,
every one who would listen; inculcating moral lessons, and
finally incurring the disapprobation of at least a voting
majority of his fellow-citizens. He gathered about him a company
of remarkable men with Plato at their head, but this could not
save him from the disapprobation of the multitudes, at whose
hands he suffered death, legally administered after a public
trial. The facts at command as to certain customs of the Greeks
at this period make it possible to raise a question as to whether
the alleged "corruption of youth," with which Socrates was
charged, may not have had a different implication from what
posterity has preferred to ascribe to it. But this thought,
almost shocking to the modern mind and seeming altogether
sacrilegious to most students of Greek philosophy, need not here
detain us; neither have we much concern in the present connection
with any part of the teaching of the martyred philosopher. For
the historian of metaphysics, Socrates marks an epoch, but for
the historian of science he is a much less consequential figure.

Similarly regarding Plato, the aristocratic Athenian who sat at
the feet of Socrates, and through whose writings the teachings of
the master found widest currency. Some students of philosophy
find in Plato "the greatest thinker and writer of all time."[1]
The student of science must recognize in him a thinker whose
point of view was essentially non-scientific; one who tended
always to reason from the general to the particular rather than
from the particular to the general. Plato's writings covered
almost the entire field of thought, and his ideas were presented
with such literary charm that successive generations of readers
turned to them with unflagging interest, and gave them wide
currency through copies that finally preserved them to our own
time. Thus we are not obliged in his case, as we are in the case
of every other Greek philosopher, to estimate his teachings
largely from hearsay evidence. Plato himself speaks to us
directly. It is true, the literary form which he always adopted,
namely, the dialogue, does not give quite the same certainty as
to when he is expressing his own opinions that a more direct
narrative would have given; yet, in the main, there is little
doubt as to the tenor of his own opinions--except, indeed, such
doubt as always attaches to the philosophical reasoning of the
abstract thinker.

What is chiefly significant from our present standpoint is that
the great ethical teacher had no significant message to give the
world regarding the physical sciences. He apparently had no
sharply defined opinions as to the mechanism of the universe; no
clear conception as to the origin or development of organic
beings; no tangible ideas as to the problems of physics; no
favorite dreams as to the nature of matter. Virtually his back
was turned on this entire field of thought. He was under the sway
of those innate ideas which, as we have urged, were among the
earliest inductions of science. But he never for a moment
suspected such an origin for these ideas. He supposed his
conceptions of being, his standards of ethics, to lie back of all
experience; for him they were the most fundamental and most
dependable of facts. He criticised Anaxagoras for having tended


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