Here and there we do find practices
which jar upon modern feeling, but on the whole we feel in reading the
Hippocratic writings nearer to their spirit than to that of the Arabians
or of the many writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A. D.
And it is not only against the thaumaturgic powers that the Hippocratic
writings protested, but they express an equally active reaction against
the excesses and defects of the new philosophy, a point brought out very
clearly by Gomperz.(24) He regards it as an undying glory of the school
of Cos that after years of vague, restless speculation it introduces
"steady sedentary habits into the intellectual life of mankind."
'Fiction to the right! Reality to the left!' was the battle-cry of this
school in the war they were the first to wage against the excesses and
defects of the nature-philosophy. Though the protest was effective in
certain directions, we shall see that the authors of the Hippocratic
writings could not entirely escape from the hypotheses of the older
philosophers.
(24) Gomperz: Greek Thinkers, Vol. I, p. 296.
I can do no more than indicate in the briefest possible way some of the
more important views ascribed to Hippocrates. We cannot touch upon the
disputes between the Coan and Cnidian schools.
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