Already in describing Galen’s dissections and tests with the pulse we have seen evidence of the accurate observation and experimental instincts which accompanied his zest for hard work and zeal for truth. In one of his treatises he confesses that it was a passion of his always to test everything for himself. “And if anyone accuses me of this, I will confess my disease, from which I have suffered all my life long, that I have trusted no one of those who narrate such things until I have tested it myself, if it was possible for me to have experience of it.”[665] Galen also recognized that general theories were not sufficient for exact knowledge and that specific examples seen with one’s own eyes were indispensable.[666] He maintains that, if all teachers and writers would realize and observe this, they would make comparatively few false statements. He saw the danger of making absolute assertions and the need of noting the particular circumstances of each individual case.[667] Galen more than once declared that things, not names, were important and refused to waste time in disputing about terminology and definitions which might be spent in “pursuing the knowledge of things themselves.”[668] Thus we see in Galen a pragmatic scientist intent upon concrete facts and exact knowledge; but at the same time it must be recognized that he accepted some universal theorems and general views. [Sidenote: Attitude towards authorities.] Galen did not believe in merely repeating in new books the statements of previous authorities. Ever since boyhood, he writes in his _Anatomical Administrations_, it has seemed to him that one should record in writing only one’s new discoveries and not repeat what has been said already.[669] Nevertheless in some of his writings he collects the prescriptions of past physicians at great length, and a previous treatise by Archigenes is practically embodied in one of Galen’s works on compound medicines. On another occasion, however, after stating that Crito had combined previous treatises upon cosmetics, including the work of Cleopatra, into four books of his own which constitute a well-nigh exhaustive treatment of the subject, Galen says that he sees no profit in copying Crito’s work again and merely reproduces its table of contents.[670] On the other hand, as this passage shows, Galen thought that the ancients had stated many things admirably and he had little patience with contemporaries who would learn nothing from them but were always ambitiously weaving new and complicated dogmas, or misinterpreting and perverting the teachings of the ancients.[671] His method was rather first to “make haste and stretch every nerve to learn what the most celebrated of the ancients have said;”[672] then, having mastered this teaching, to judge it and put it to the test for a long time and determine by observation how much of it agrees and how much disagrees with actual phenomena, and then embrace the former portion and reject the latter.