as much right to be termed general, as any which I possess myself, the difference being one of degree." So long as Mr. Müller puts his exclusive claim solely on the ground that animals have no language, he must not expect to gain over many adherents. "Animals cannot talk, because they have no general ideas; they evidently have no general ideas, because they do not talk"—surely, as pretty a circle as ever was drawn with compasses; a mere duplication and bending around into a curved and reentering form of the dogma that thought is impossible without words; that the intellect cannot apprehend resemblances and differences, cannot compare and infer, without the bodily organs to make signs for it. If this is an exaltation of the value of language, it is an equal degradation of the power of the mind.—Contemporary Review.
| THE CONSERVATIVE DESIGN OF ORGANIC DISEASE. |
By Prof. A. F. A. KING, M. D.
IF we should say that diseases prolong life, that without them man would be more liable than he is to sudden death, the announcement would be received by most medical thinkers, and by all those who have never studied pathology at all, as a transcendental idea, quite insusceptible of logical proof. But it is otherwise: that certain processes of disease are really conservative, and contribute to the longevity of the individual, is an absolute fact, as we shall now endeavor to demonstrate.
Let it be noted that almost from time immemorial physicians have recognized in the body a certain power of resisting injuries, and of returning spontaneously to health, when disordered; and this they have called the power of Nature—the vis medlcatrix naturæ. The growth of this idea culminated, during the sixteenth century, in the establishment of the so-called "Stahlian system of medicine." And, while the doctrines of Stahl were sustained and elaborated by many of the leading physicians of his day,[1] we now know they were erroneous, for he maintained that there resided in the organism a "rational soul" which, he affirmed, not only formed the body, but excited and directed all of its motions; it was alleged to perceive intelligently the tendency of all external impressions acting upon the body, and to excite such motions as would favor the beneficial and obviate the injurious influence of such impressions. Hence, generally speaking, diseases were considered to be salutary efforts of the "presiding soul," and were to be
- ↑ By Perrault in France, Gaubius in Holland, Porterfield and Simpson in Scotland, Juncker in Germany, and by Nichols and Mead in England.
