In the next section I intend to give a careful analysis of all the writings which have come down to us from antiquity under the name of Hippocrates, and to state clearly the grounds upon which some are to be received as genuine, and others rejected as supposititious. I shall conclude the present section, although it may appear that I am anticipating some things which had better have come after the succeeding one, with a brief account of our author’s general principles, both as regards the theory and the practice of medicine; and in doing this I mean not to confine myself strictly to the treatises which are acknowledged to be genuine, as they are unfortunately so few in number, that we are often obliged to guess at the tenets of our author from those held by his immediate successors and disciples. The opinions which he held as to the origin of medicine, and the necessities in human life which gave rise to it, are such as bespeak the soundness of his views, and the eminently practical bent of his genius. It was the necessity, he says,[39] which men in the first stages of society must have felt of ascertaining the properties of vegetable productions as articles of food that gave rise to the science of Dietetics; and the discovery having been made that the same system of regimen does not apply in a disordered as in a healthy condition of the body, men felt themselves compelled to study what changes of the aliment are proper in disease; and it was the accumulation of facts bearing on this subject which gave rise to the art of Medicine. Looking upon the animal system as one whole, every part of which conspires and sympathizes with all the other parts, he would appear to have regarded disease also as one, and to have referred all its modifications to peculiarities of situation.[40] Whatever may now be thought of his general views on Pathology, all must admit that his mode of prosecuting the cultivation of medicine is in the true spirit of the Inductive Philosophy; all his descriptions of disease are evidently derived from patient observation of its phenomena, and all his rules of practice are clearly based on experience. Of the fallaciousness of experience by itself he was well aware, however, and has embodied this great truth in a memorable aphorism,[41] and therefore he never exempts the apparent results of experience from the strict scrutiny of reason. Above all others, Hippocrates was strictly the physician of experience and common sense. In short, the basis of his system was a rational experience, and not a blind empiricism, so that the Empirics in after ages had no good grounds for claiming him as belonging to their sect.[42]