BUT on that account, I say, we ought not to reject the ancient Art,
as if it were not, and had not been properly founded, because it
did not attain accuracy in all things, but rather, since it is capable of
reaching to the greatest exactitude by reasoning, to receive it and
admire its discoveries, made from a state of great ignorance, and as
having been well and properly made, and not from chance.(Hippocrates,
On Ancient Medicine, Adams edition, Vol. 1, 1849, p.
168.)
THE true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this:
that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.
(Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorisms, LXXXI, Spedding's
translation.)
A GOLDEN thread has run throughout the history of the world,
consecutive and continuous, the work of the best men in successive ages.
From point to point it still runs, and when near you feel it as the
clear and bright and searchingly irresistible light which Truth throws
forth when great minds conceive it.(Walter Moxon,
Pilocereus Senilis and Other Papers, 1887, p. 4.)
FOR the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition
of the bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a means of
rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been, I believe
that it is in medicine that it must be sought. It is true that the
medicine which is now in vogue contains little of which the utility is
remarkable; but, without having any intention of decrying it, I am sure
that there is no one, even among those who make its study a profession,
who does not confess that all that men know is almost nothing
in comparison with what remains to be known; and that we could
be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even
also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge
of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided
us.(Descartes: Discourse on the Method, Philosophical Works.
Translated by E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. I, Cam. Univ.
Press, 1911, p. 120.)
