matic sect, for his method was to
reduce all his knowledge, as acquired by the observation of facts, to
general theoretical principles. These principles he indeed professed to
deduce from experience and observation,[267] and we have abundant proofs
of his diligence in collecting experience and his accuracy in making
observations; but still, in a certain sense at least, he regards
individual facts and the details of experience as of little value,
unconnected with the principles which he laid down as the basis of all
medical reasoning. In this fundamental point, therefore, the method
pursued by Galen appears to have been directly the reverse of that which
we now consider as the correct method of scientific investigation; and
yet, such is the force of actual genius, that in most instances he
attained the ultimate object in view, although by an indirect path. He was
an admirer of Hippocrates, and always speaks of him with the most profound
respect, professing to act upon his principles, and to do little more
than expound his doctrines and support them by new facts and observations.
Yet in reality we have few writers whose works, both as to substance and
manner, are more different from each other than those of Hippocrates and
Galen, the simplicity of the former being strongly contrasted with the
abstruseness and refinement of the latter."

The antagonism between these two great men was not perhaps more marked
than might have been expected, considering that an interval of six hundred
years lay between them. However loyal he may have been to his master,
Galen, with his keen, catholic, and subtle intellect, was bound to fall
under the sway of Alexandrian influence while he studied in Alexandria as
the pupil of Heraclianus. The methods of the contemporary school of
philosophy fascinated him; and, in his endeavour to bring Medicine out of
the chaotic welter in which he found it, he attempted--unhappily for the
future of science--to use the hyper-idealistic Platonism then dominant in
Alexandria, rather than the gradual and orderly induction of Hippocrates,
as a bond of union between professional and scientific medicine; a false
step for which not even his great services to anatomy and physiology can
altogether atone. Yet most likely it was this same error, an error which
practically led to the enslavement of Medicine till the seventeenth
century, which caused Cardan to regard him, and not Hippocrates, as his
master. The vastness an