HYPNOTISM AND ITS ANTECEDENTS
Important periods in the history of science are as likely to be characterized by changes in attitude towards the accepted body of knowledge, as by the extension of its realm through new discoveries. The contrast between the undeveloped and the advanced stages of a science is as well realized by noting the totally different mode in which facts are viewed, as by observing the vast increase in the range of recorded fact. The alchemist and the chemist have far more in common in the way of operations and material than in their conceptions of the purposes and the method of their pursuits. The astrologer and the astronomer are again most characteristically differentiated by their motives and point of view; both observe the positions of planet and star, and calculate orbits and phases and oppositions; but nothing is more absurdly irrelevant to the astronomer's purpose than the hope of predicting the fortunes of men. A more modern example of a similar relation is that between phrenology and the physiological doctrine of the localization of functions in the brain. And alchemist, astrologer, and phrenologist have this in common: that they aimed at immediately practical ends. The one hoped to create wealth, the other to foretell and control fate, and the third to insure success by discovering the earmarks of natural gifts. They distorted the facts of nature, and in the narrow pursuit of a practical goal, substituted for realities their own fanciful theories, or the elaborations of their defective logic. Science advances most favorably when the best energies are devoted to a comprehension of fundamental principles and to the accumulation of data under the guidance of the interests to which these principles give rise; and when the work proceeds with the confidence that, more indirectly but more surely, will the richest practical benefits thus accrue. The marked contrast exemplified in the history of chemistry and astronomy, and in a more limited way of brain physiology, make it proper to speak of the very different pursuits with which they were associated as their antecedents and not as early stages of their own development. Intimate as may be the relations between the two historically, the one represents but the forerunner of the other; it indicates in what direction interest guided thought before that changed interest appeared, which made possible the germination and growth of the true science. Only when the weeds had been rooted out did the flowers begin to thrive.