Such speculations in theosophical and medical domains at first were most eagerly entered upon by the Jewish sects of the Essenians, or Essenes, and Therapeutæ. According to the description which Josephus (Book 2, Chapter II., page 13) has left us of these two sects, they were theosophical communists. We, as physicians, however, are principally interested in the position they took with regard to our profession, and that was one of indifference. They believed that they should not obtain their knowledge of the body, either in health or in disease, by observation, on which physicians relied. They believed they could actually learn the art of healing from a study of their old Sacred Scriptures. For that reason they especially applied themselves to make a diligent examination of these Holy Scriptures. They believed that they were able, by various allegorical interpretations of different letters and words, as well as by subtle explanations of this or that sentence, to acquire the knowledge necessary for the treatment of their patients. Those, however, who had become imbued with this wisdom of dotage in an especial degree, claimed the possession of numerous miraculous powers—for instance, that of prediction. But as they also believed in the existence of beings who, while they were lower than God, at the same time were higher than man, they had, ready at hand, the rarest resources to draw upon for the practise of their juggling feats of miraculous medicine. The belief in these mystical doctrines took the most extravagant forms. Thus, for instance, it was believed that a man by the evacuation of feces offered an insult to divinity (τὰς αὐγὰς ὑβρίζειν τοῦ θεοῦ, says Josephus, lib. 2, Chapter VIII., No. 9, § 15). For that reason nobody might dare, on the Sabbath, to comply with such demands of nature. But whether the call of nature always yielded to these rather far-reaching requirements of the law, or how the believer helped himself when the extremely disagreeable dissension between nature and faith caused too much uneasiness, is not reported either by Josephus or by Porphyrius. Besides, the Essenians had their troubles even on week-days in attending to final phases of the digestive process, in that it was incumbent upon them to conceal the termination of the act of digestion from the view of the Supreme Being by covering themselves with a cloak.