Now Hippocrates, who was the first known to us of all those who have been both physicians and philosophers inasmuch as he was the first to recognize what Nature effects, expresses his admiration of her, and is constantly singing her praises and calling her "just." Alone, he says, she suffices for the animal in every respect, performing of her own accord and without any teaching all that is required. Being such, she has, as he supposes, certain _faculties_, one attractive of what is appropriate,[94] and another eliminative of what is foreign, and she nourishes the animal, makes it grow, and expels its diseases by crisis.[95] Therefore he says that there is in our bodies a concordance in the movements of air and fluid, and that everything is in sympathy. According to Asclepiades, however, nothing is naturally in sympathy with anything else, all substance being divided and broken up into inharmonious elements and absurd "molecules." Necessarily, then, besides making countless other statements in opposition to plain fact, he was ignorant of Nature's faculties, both that attracting what is appropriate, and that expelling what is foreign. Thus he invented some wretched nonsense to explain blood-production and _anadosis_,[96] and, being utterly unable to find anything to say regarding the clearing-out[97] of superfluities, he did not hesitate to join issue with obvious facts, and, in this matter of urinary secretion, to deprive both the kidneys and the ureters of their activity, by assuming that there were certain invisible channels opening into the bladder. It was, of course, a grand and impressive thing to do, to mistrust the obvious, and to pin one's faith in things which could not be seen! Also, in the matter of the yellow bile, he makes an even grander and more spirited venture; for he says this is actually generated in the bile-ducts, not merely separated out. How comes it, then, that in cases of jaundice two things happen at the same time--that the dejections contain absolutely no bile, and that the whole body becomes full of it? He is forced here again to talk nonsense, just as he did in regard to the urine. He also talks no less nonsense about the black bile and the spleen, not understanding what was said by Hippocrates; and he attempts in stupid--I might say insane--language, to contradict what he knows nothing about.