Already more than a hundred years ago, Hahnemann, the founder of the homœopathic method of treating disease, consciously and completely abandoned the crude quantitative position in the field of medical science. He had freed himself entirely from the quantitative conception of curative effect. He called his remedies “potencies,” and this potency was determined not according to mass but according to the fineness, the delicacy of the mutual accord between the organism and the remedy. This mutual accord, however, grows subtler, more acute, with progressive dematerialization, with the freeing of the active energies resident in the remedies from the burden of their ballast of material. Hence the apparently paradoxical idea that the curative effect augmented with the diminution of the dose--an idea which has given the doctors of the orthodox schools such abundant occasion for misunderstanding and barbed raillery. The effectiveness is not increased with the lessening of the dose, but with the subtilization of the unique accords concerned. Hahnemann had the courage to bring his thinking into line with the actual energies and their manner of working--a courage which modern serum therapeutics does not possess, and quite likely never will possess, so that we may look to see the wave of actuality which here has burst upon therapeutic life again crushed under by re-actual tendencies. Wherever opposites are found, there mere dialectical problems form the subject of contention. The contradictions between the mechanical and the teleological views with respect to the living organism are also of a purely dialectical nature. Both take up the position that the organism is an identity, and accordingly a something so constituted that it can take nutriment _into itself_. Both alike, teleology as mechanism, looking upon the cell as life itself, make it their endeavour to master the miracle of that life; the former, as a result of its efforts, coming to the conclusion that a vital force, an incomprehensible something in itself, must somewhere lie concealed in this wonderful machinery; whilst the latter pushes on unswervingly towards the goal it has set before itself--that of becoming, by ever closer and closer description, master at length of the great riddle. As everywhere, so also here, the Buddha stands between and above these two opposites, inasmuch as he teaches:--