"The ignominy of the word _empiric_ dates from the ages in which scholastic philosophy deduced physical consequences _a priori_;--the ages in which, because a lion is strong, rubbing with lion's fat would have been held an infallible tonic. In those happy days, if a physician had given decoction of a certain bark, only because in numberless instances that decoction had been found to strengthen the patient, he would have been a miserable empiric. Not that the colleges would have passed over his returns because they were empirical: they knew better. They were as skilful in finding causes for facts, as facts for causes. The president and the elects of that day would have walked out into the forest with a rope, and would have pulled heartily at the tree which yielded the bark: nor would they ever have left it until they had pulled out a legitimate {200} reason. If the tree had resisted all their efforts, they would have said, 'Ah! no wonder now; the bark of a strong tree makes a strong man.' But if they had managed to serve the tree as you would like to serve homoeopathy, then it would have been 'We might have guessed it; all the _virtus roborativa_ has settled in the bark.' They admitted, as we know from Moliere, the _virtus dormitiva_[343] of opium, for no other reason than that opium _facit dormire_.[344] Had the medicine not been previously _known_, they would, strange as it may seem to modern pharmacopoeists, have accorded a _virtus dormitiva_ to the new _facit dormire_. On this point they have been misapprehended. They were prone to infer _facit_ from a _virtus_ imagined _a priori_; and they were ready in supplying _facit_ in favor of an orthodox _virtus_. They might have gone so far, for example, under pre-notional impressions, as the alliterative allopath, who, when maintenance of truth was busy opposing the progress of science called _vaccination_, declared that some of its patients coughed like cows, and bellowed like bulls; but they never refused to find _virtus_ when _facit_ came upon them, no matter whence. They would rather have accepted Tenterden steeple than have rejected the Goodwin Sands. They would have laughed their modern imitators to scorn: but as they are not here, we do it for them. "The man of our day--the _a priori_ philosopher--tries the question whether opium can cause sleep by finding out in the recesses of his own noddle whether the drug can have a dormitive power: Well! but did not the schoolman do the same? He did; but mark the distinction. The schoolman had recourse to first principles, when there was no opium to try it by: our man settles the point in the same way _with a lump of opium before him_. The schoolman shifted his principles with his facts: the man of our drawing-rooms will fight facts with his principles, just as an old {201} physician would have done in actual practice, with the rod of his _Church_ at his back.