My Autobiography: A FragmentMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
My Autobiography: A Fragment
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Asianists -- Germany -- Biography; Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900
But to return to Hahnemann. He was very kind to me, and I looked up to
him as a giant both in body and in mind. But he could not deliver me
from my enemy, the ever recurrent migraine. The cures, however, both
at Dessau and at Coethen, where he had been made a _Hofrath_ by the
reigning Duke, were very extraordinary. Hahnemann remained in Coethen
till 1835, and in that year, when he was eighty, he married a young
French lady, Melanie d’Hervilly, and was carried off by her to Paris,
where he soon gained a large practice, and died in 1843, that is at
the age of eighty-eight. Much of his success, I feel sure, was due to
his presence and to the confidence which he inspired. How do I know
that Sir Andrew Clarke, seeing that I was in low spirits about my
health, did not think it right to encourage me, and by encouraging me
did certainly make me feel confident about myself, and thus raised my
vitality, my spirits, or whatever we like to call it? “Thy faith hath
made thee whole” is a lesson which doctors ought not to neglect.
How little we know the effect of the environment in which we grow up.
My old granny has drawn deeper furrows through my young soul than all
my teachers and preachers put together. I am not going to add a
chapter to that most unsatisfactory of all studies, child-psychology.
It is an impossible subject. The victim—the child—cannot be
interrogated till it is too late. The influences that work on the
child’s senses and mind cannot be determined; they are too many, and
too intangible. The observers of babies, mostly young fathers proud of
their first offspring, remind me always of a very learned friend of
mine, who presented to the Royal Society most laborious pages
containing his lifelong observations on certain deviations of the
magnetic needle, and who had forgotten that in making these
observations he always had a pair of steel spectacles on his nose.
However, I have nothing to say against these observations, nor against
their more or less successful interpretations. But the real harm
begins when people imagine that in studying the ways of infants they
can discover what man was like in his original condition, whether as a
hairy or a hairless creature. To imagine that we can learn from the
way in which children begin to use our old words, how the primitive
language of mankind was formed, seems to me like imagining that
children playing with counters would teach us how and for what purpose
the first money was coined. There is no doubt a grain of truth in this
infantile psychology, but it requires as many caveats as that which is
called ethnological psychology, which makes us see in the savages of
the present day the representation of the first ancestors of our race,
and would teach us to discover in their superstitions the antecedents
of the mythology and religion of the Aryan or Semitic races. The same
philosophers who constantly fall back on heredity and atavism in
order to explain what seems inexplicable in the beliefs and customs
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