Haeckel, and of Weismann, with their elaborate theoretical systems.

During these exciting times, the man who had started it all was quietly at work upon a book descriptive of "The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilized by insects." Incidental bits of this study came out in 1860, 1861, and 1862, and the finished work in 1862. Such was Darwin's continual attitude toward controversy-not contemptuous but simply unworried, content to make use of whatever criticism was helpful, and to watch to improve the wording in the next edition wherever it appeared that his language was honestly misunderstood.

Only a very few of the adverse criticisms touched him where it hurt. One, for example, let it be understood that he wrote with an air of cock-sureness, a sin of which he could not bear even the shadow of suspicion. At another time Darwin bursts into righteous indignation on Huxley's behalf, when he catches a reviewer ascribing to Huxley a motive in his belief-Lyell's "'object' to make man old, and Huxley's 'object' to degrade him. The wretched writer has not a glimpse of what the discovery of scientific truth means." Such was his spontaneous outburst at the least hint that scientific opinions might be motivated.

Darwinism was the signal for an overwhelming readjustment of popular metaphysics, as everybody knows, but it really seems hard to realize to-day how deeply men's minds were shaken, all through the thirty or forty years of the readjustment, by questions of purely abstract philosophy, or to what an extent the biological scientists have taken part in the philosophic questions. To make vivid the acuteness of that old situation, we may recall how Huxley, intensely loyal as he always was to the scientific concept. of causation, nevertheless declared in substance (Romanes Lecture) that ethics was inexplicable, to the best of his understanding, from the standpoint of biological evolution; or again to the attitude of Wallace (Darwinism, Ch. XV) that the higher intellectual, esthetic and moral gifts of man are gratuities bestowed upon him by a benevolent deity through agencies entirely outside. of the workings of biological evolution.

In all these abstruser corollaries of evolution Darwin took absolutely no part whatever, and even when questioned he did little more than plead ignorance and incompetence. Theism seemed to him a deduction flung too far afield to be dependable. He can not help doubting whether our brain equipment was ever designed for such uses. Nevertheless, he seems to have retained to the end of his days the simple rudiment of faith that "this universe is not the result of blind chance" ("Descent of Man," last pages;

"Life" I, 286), even though our intellects may not have the caliber to prove what else it is.

In all this, and especially in his freedom from intensity over such matters, he was hardly a type of his own era, and I can not help feeling that he is more at one with the complexion of thinking men of to-day-men to whom the evolutionary conception is as natural as it was to Darwin himself, so that they are no longer fussed by its possible metaphysical implications. Like him they still possess a philosophy of life, but one that is more proximate and less abstruse than what their nineteenth century predecessors were mostly wrestling with.

Is it not possible that the older generation of teachers to-day, the men who were brought up on Darwin as their daily bread, but who on account of the mental stresses of their era had to fight to attain and to defend the true Darwinian spirit of scientific candor -that these teachers to-day are finding in their pupils youths for whom a part of this victory has been won in advance, so that scientific candor, the spirit of unmotivated judgments, is for them an easier lesson than it was during the era of storm and stress in which the teachers had to learn it?

If this description is accurate, a substantial part of the credit must be ascribed to the slow-working leaven of the personality of Darwin himself, perpetuated in his writings and ramifying through the examples of those whose scientific ideals he has inspired.

THE MENTALITY AND THE COSMOLOGY OF CLAUDIUS GALEN

THO

By JONATHAN WRIGHT, M.D.

HOSE who think of Galen at all, even those who have had some acquaintance with his writings, think of him as a physician, but a man can not be entirely a physician without being somewhat of a philosopher.1 Hippocrates puts it a little differently and says no one can be so well a philosopher as he who seeks the truth in a study of medicine. I am not sure there is not much that one should ponder in this opinion. Such wisdom as one arrives at in regard to the moral and physical destiny of man as well as in regard to his environment is to be garnered most abundantly close to physiological and psychological fields. Now, singular to say, the things that are most lacking in the philosophy of Galen are the ethical values of humanity in their broader aspects. Man's narrower personal outlook constantly receives incidental mention as one goes through the vast sea of his professional writings. These are commonplaces of worldly wisdom, which he did not practice very successfully in some respects, owing to his glaring temperamental defects. Into all this I do not intend here to enter at all except to repeat that his philosophy in no way entitled him to boast the proud apothegm of Terence, Nihil humanum mihi alienum est. In so far as man himself is part of the cosmos in its intellectual and moral spheres, Galen's cosmical philosophy is negligible.

It is however with the ultimate structure of the universe that Galen's chief interests lie in cosmical philosophy. He is the heir and one of the chief sources of our historical knowledge of the strivings of the earliest Greek philosophers after a fundamental knowledge of natural phenomena. He was educated in a thorough régime of moral philosophy as taught by the various schools of his day; but, though he shows some traces of the teachings of the Stoics, it is the physical nature and structure of man alone he studies from the viewpoint of the Nature Philosophers. Doubtless in the shaping of the humoral doctrines for their final permanency in medicine, moral philosophy has little place, but the neglect of intellectual interests in certain directions perhaps had something

1 Galeni de optima secta ad Thrasybulum, Liber I, 107. In these references I use the Kühn Latin translation, the Roman characters denoting the volume of that edition and the Arabic the page number.

to do with the oppressive narrowness and the absurdities into which he guided medical doctrines and where they remained for more than 1,500 years. Despite his formal piety he was a contentious upholder of positivism-a very mule's head in debate is the only contemporary notice we have of him. His admiration for Plato was but lip service so far as the practical workings of his mind are concerned. It is true he acknowledges that though our extended acquaintance with natural phenomena is acquired through the senses there is an innate knowledge, but how it works or to what it owes its existence is not so clear. A man knows when a line is straight and when it is crooked. "Of course with asses no one permits oneself to argue, for they have no minds, so also with men who have only minds in which they have no confidence.''2 There is no use of referring the uncertainty of knowledge to one who has no organ of knowledge, he viciously says, or does not believe he has. To tell the skeptic he is not sure he thinks because he has nothing to think with may be witty enough, if one is in the mood for wit, but it is a flippant way to discuss problems of serious philosophical import. At best it is only one of the jokes of the ages revamped in every generation. In Plato the wit in the discussion plays no less around the subject, but it is less offensive and more subtile, more suggestive and instructive. The doctrine of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things is discussed more pleasantly, more profoundly, and the argument, unflinchingly nevertheless, faces the doctrine of eternal verities in the realm of ideas. Although I have elsewhere dwelt in dissent on the inclination to place the quality of Galen's mind in the category of that of Hippocrates or to rank it with that of Plato or of Aristotle, I allude to it again, for in studying his cosmic philosophy it becomes apparent that his contribution to it contains nothing original and his comments lack originality not alone because he lived in an age long since degenerated from that of the giants of Greek thought, but the quality of his mind was a handicap which even a favorable environment could not overcome. In a way his own gibe could be turned against himself. He did not have a suitable organ to do that kind of thinking with.

It would be an endless task to select from all his writings and summarize the incidental references marking his thought as to the nature and extent of the divisions of matter, but we have one treatise in the form of a commentary on the ideas of Hippocrates as to its constitution which we can use as a guide to his cosmic philosophy in the sense I have defined it. He there takes up the

2 Galeni de optima doctrina, Liber I, 40.

3 De elementis ex Hippocrate, Liber I, 413.

VOL. XV-10

cudgels in defence of the author of the "Nature of Man," in the Hippocratic Corpus. If we were to discuss here the philosophy of Hippocrates instead of that of Galen we should have to consider the question in some detail as to this book being the product of the mind of the man who wrote the best of the books of that collection. Galen from his own limitations saw no reason why it can not be placed among them. But modern critics with Littré at their head insist this can not be done even if we consider only the tenor of thought of the writer. While some of the doctrine in it seems evolved out of passages in the "Ancient Medicine," in the latter the author advances no such vulnerable argumentation on cosmic subjects as that Galen is at pains to defend. The manner in which he does this, rather than his adoption of the opinions there found, gives us an insight into his methods of thought. It can not be said that he always defers to the opinion of Hippocrates, perhaps, though I have never been reminded he was actually contradicting him, but it is quite apparent that he does violence to the text occasionally as well as to the meaning in reading some of his own convictions or rather his own preferences into the criticisms he reports Hippocrates makes of the opinions of others.

It is curious the disciple in his commentary should deduce from the master the argument for a plurality of elements which he stresses. Man would be devoid of feeling or sensibility, and his five senses would not function, if one only element was the material out of which man is compounded. They both fail to take into account the forces working on matter, a contribution made by Empedocles, though Galen was aware of them as he mentions them incidentally elsewhere, indeed makes much of innate dynamic influences in physiological action, drawn more or less directly from that ancient philosopher. The diversity of these in their potentiality for making contrasts, whereby things are perceived by the apposition of their contraries, apparently does not occur to him. It would seem that while the argument he emphasizes is prominent in the medical treatise he ascribes to Hippocrates, "The Nature of Man," it might be allowed to pass as the superficial argument of a writer who had specialized on medicine and was not concerned with ultimate cosmic doctrine. Whether it is a genuine treatise of the great Hippocrates or not, it is not one to which great weight can be attached. In the books now considered genuine, Hippocrates so far as I know makes no use of this argument. It follows from the terms of the doctrine of Democritus that his atoms, the ultimate divisions of matter, are devoid of qualities in themselves but give rise to the perception of sense only by means of the kind of impact. they make on the animal structure. By the way in which Plato treats the doctrine of Protagoras, really based on some such view