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The Romish doctrine of the Church began with Cyprian in the third century. When the Puritans of that day, the Montanists, Novatians and Donatists unduly emphasized the ideal character of the Church, there was justification for the answer of Cyprian, emphasizing its empiric character, its actual condition.
The most agitated, nervous man present was Jenkins. Full of obsequious attentions for his "illustrious colleagues," as he called them, with his lips pursed up, he hung round their consultation and attempted to take part in it; but the colleagues kept him at a distance and hardly answered him, as Fagon the Fagon of Louis XIV might have addressed some empiric summoned to the royal bedside.
In his house there was an old work on medicine, published towards the end of the last century, and to put himself in harmony with events Melbury spread this work on his knees when he had done his day's business, and read about Galen, Hippocrates, and Herophilus of the dogmatic, the empiric, the hermetical, and other sects of practitioners that have arisen in history; and thence proceeded to the classification of maladies and the rules for their treatment, as laid down in this valuable book with absolute precision.
With all his reliance on nature then, and with all his scorn of the impracticable and arrogant conceits of learning as he finds it, and of the quackeries that are practised in its name, this is no empiric.
Put in concrete form, the question stands thus: Has the idea of Deity lost its practical significance, because it has been divested of its absolute character, and its purely empiric origin has been recognised? and If the idea of Right is no more an absolute one than the idea of Deity, does it follow that the influence of Right must be placed upon the same plane as the influence of conscience?
To diet a man into weakness and languor, afterwards to give him the greater strength, has more of the empiric than the rational physician.
But he was happy, because behind his shop he had installed a little laboratory where he continued for his pleasure his experiments in alchemy and his study of plants. He still proposed to write a book that he had already spoken of in France to Rouletabille, to prove the truth of "Empiric Treatment of Medicinal Herbs, the Science of Alchemy, and the Ancient Experiments in Sorcery."
Though personally somewhat gaunt, he is nevertheless a jolly-looking character, totally free from that would-be professional air assumed by some of our medical students to hide lack of experience; for he, empiric though he be, has no idea of any of his own shortcomings, and greets us with an easy smile.
For it is this picture of the unaccommodated man 'unaccommodated' still, with all his empiric arts, with all his wordy philosophy it is this picture of man 'as he is, in the misery of his IGNORANCE, in his blind struggle with his law of KIND, which is his law of 'BEING, unreconciled to his place in the universal order, where he must live or have no life for the beast, obedient to his law, rejects from his kinds the degenerate man it is this vivid, condensed, scientific exhibition, this scientific collection of the fact of man as he is, in his empiric struggle with the law which universal nature enforces, and will enforce on him with all her pains and penalties till he learns it it is this 'negation' which brings out the true doctrine of man and human society in this method of inquiry.
His works have been much read in all ages, and have only been set aside by the discoveries of the last few centuries. Serapion, another physician, was perhaps of this reign. He followed medicine rather than surgery; and, while trusting chiefly to his experience gained in clinical or bedside practice, was laughed at by the surgeons as an empiric.
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