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By Root 1038 0

views of John Locke, the Englishman who had developed the concept of sensationalism a hundred years earlier. According to Locke knowledge had no source but that of experience. This experience could be either external, gained from the world around and contact with it, or internal, due to the process of mental reflection. From sensory contact with the outside world came ‘ideas’which were either simple or complex. Simple ideas, such as whiteness, space, and so on, were irreducible in nature, while complex ideas were combinations of simple ideas. Locke’s rational system of analysis gave birth to an intellectual movement which became known as the Enlightenment.

One of the great Enlightenment thinkers in France, Etienne Condillac, took Locke’s ideas further. He said that the only way to understand the world was to regard sensations as the primary data of cognition. All ideas and faculties of understanding, he held, were compounds of simple ideas, which in turn were the result of sensations to be found through analysis of compound ideas. Everything, in the end, was sensory, said Condillac: ‘Penser c’est toujours sentir’ (to think is to feel). Each sensory source datum was to be carefully examined and its relationship with other sensory data noted. Preconceived notions of the relationship must be discarded if the clearest analysis were to be obtained.

After Condillac’s death, in 1780, Immanuel Kant popularised the system throughout Europe. In Germany his philosophy appealed to physicians keen to reduce medical practice to a simpler, more certain system. For Kant, the doctor functioned in a world of physical appearances and should therefore be aware of his own perception, understanding and judgement of these appearances before he made a diagnosis.

The doctors saw Kant as a welcome enemy of dogma, who would lead them to certainty and efficacy through reason. But Kant was to take them much further. He postulated that understanding of the world could come only because there were certain concepts already embedded in the mind: time, space and causality. These acted like a matrix into which all perceived sensations fitted. Kant stated that there were, therefore, no laws in nature itself, but merely mental constructions in the human mind set up so as to give shape to disordered natural data. Science, he said, was a way of systematising phenomena into constructs so as to permit the clearest understanding of the phenomena and their interconnection. All knowledge, therefore, could be reduced to a small number of principles functioning in every case.

One of Kant’s followers, Friedrich von Schelling, Professor of Medicine at Bamberg, developed these ideas into a system of thought, known as Naturphil-osophie, which was to have a profound effect on the Romantic movement and on European science in general. Schelling directed his efforts towards finding a few, fundamental principles. He believed that man had originally been at one with nature, but, through the development of the ability to reflect, had gradually moved apart from it. The aim of all thought should therefore be to eliminate this artificial ‘reflective’gulf between man and nature. In the understanding of his lost ‘oneness of all’would lie the secret of life, common to all creatures. It was with reference to the area of endeavour which was most likely to reveal the secret that Schelling wrote, in 1805, ‘Medical science is the crown, the copestone of all natural sciences, just as organic life and the human organism in particular is the copestone of all creation.’There must, it was reasoned, be a few, simple, basic laws which could be derived from observation and which would determine what was the fundamental life force. The dream of discovering the force spurred German medicine to concentrate unsuccessfully on microscopic phenomena for the next forty years, to the detriment of all other fields of research.

The French were attracted to the more practical application of the theory, though stopping short of the German obsession with investigating the secret of the universe at the expense