escending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by
intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest errors."
And they would lay their heads upon their pillows with a perfectly clear
conscience, although they were assured that they were behaving in the
same way that people of old did towards Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus,
the identical great names which were invoked by Mr. Benjamin Douglass
Perkins.

But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is not
sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief. I
therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme apparent
singularity of their pretensions. I might have omitted them, but on the
whole it seemed more just to the claims of my argument to suggest the
vast complication of improbabilities involved in the statements
enumerated. Every one must of course judge for himself as to the weight
of these objections, which are by no means brought forward as a proof of
the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but simply as entitled to a brief
consideration before the facts of the case are submitted to our scrutiny.

The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely
unconnected with and independent of each other. Were there any natural
relation between them it would seem probable enough that the discovery of
the first would have led to that of the others. But assuming it to be a
fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms
like their own, no manifest relation exists between this fact and the
next assertion, namely, the power of the infinitesimal doses. And
allowing both these to be true, neither has the remotest affinity to the
third new doctrine, that which declares seven eighths of all chronic
diseases to be owing to Psora.

This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal
doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is
often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their
own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state
of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as
his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent champions of their
faith, in their American official organ. It would be a fact without a
parallel in the history, not merely of medicine, but of science, that
three such unconnected and astonishing discoveries, each of them a
complete revolution of