Edinburgh sketches & memories

by David Masson

Is ante-mortem.

Looks to function more than structure.

Runs for the stomach-pump.

Submits to be ignorant of much.

Acts.

Now, in the particular matter in question, so far as it is here represented, we should, doubtless, all agree with our friend. We should all, for ourselves, in serious illness, infinitely prefer the attendance of any tolerable physician of the therapeutic and prognostic type to that of the ablest of the merely diagnostic type, especially if we thought that the genius of the latter inclined him to a post-mortem examination. Hence we may be disposed to think that Dr. John did good service in protesting against the run upon science, ever new science, in the medicine of his day, and trying to hark back the profession to the good old virtues of vigorous rule of thumb. What I detect, however, underneath all his expositions of this possibly salutary idea, and prompting to his reiterations of it, is something deeper. It is a dislike in his own nature to the abstract or theoretical in all matters whatsoever. Dr. John Brown’s mind, I should say, was essentially anti-speculative. His writings abound, of course, with tributes of respect to science and philosophy, and expressions of astonishment and gratitude for their achievements; but it may be observed that the thinkers and philosophers to whom he refers most fondly are chiefly those older magnates, including Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Bishop Butler among the English, whose struggle was over long ago, whose results are an accepted inheritance, and who are now standards of orthodoxy. All later drifts of speculative thought, and especially the latest drifts of his own day, seem to have made him uncomfortable. He actually warns against them as products of what he calls “the lust of innovation.” This is a matter of so much consequence in the study of Dr. John Brown’s character that it ought not to be passed over lightly.

There can be no doubt that his dislike of the purely speculative spirit, and especially of recent speculation of certain kinds, was rooted in some degree in the fine devoutness of his nature, his unswerving fidelity to his inherited religion. The system of beliefs which had been consecrated for him so dearly and powerfully by the lives and example of his immediate progenitors was still substantially that with which he went through the world himself, though it had been softened in the course of transmission, stripped of its more angular and sectarian features, and converted into a contemplative Religio Medici, not unlike that of his old English namesake, the philosopher and physician of Norwich. Like that philosopher, for whom he had all the regard of a felt affinity, he delighted in an O altitudo!, craved the refuge of an O altitudo! in all the difficulties of mere reason, and held that in that craving itself there is the sure gleam for the human spirit of the one golden key that unlocks those difficulties. A difference, however, between him and old Browne of Norwich is that he had much less of clear and definite thought, of logical grasp of prior propositions and reasonings, with which to prepare for an altitudo, justify it, and prop it up. Take as a specimen a passage relating to that very distinction between Art and Science which he valued so much:—

“It may be thought that I have shown myself, in this parallel and contrast, too much of a partisan of Art as against Science, and the same may be not unfairly said of much of the rest of this volume. It was in a measure on purpose,—the general tendency being counteractive of the purely scientific and positive, or merely informative, current of our day. We need to remind ourselves constantly that this kind of knowledge puffeth up, and that it is something quite else that buildeth up. It has been finely said that Nature is the Art of God, and we may as truly say that all Art,—in the widest sense, as practical and productive,—is His Science. He knows all that goes to the making of everything; for He is Himself, in the strictest sense, the only maker. He knows what made Shakespeare and Newton, Julius Cæsar and Plato, what we know them to have been; and they are His by the same right as the sea is His, and the strength of the hills, for He made them and His hands formed them, as well as the dry land. This making the circle for ever meet, this bringing Omega eternally round to Alpha, is, I think, more and more revealing itself as a great central, personal, regulative truth, and is being carried down more than ever into the recesses of physical research, where Nature is fast telling her long-kept secrets: all her tribes speaking, each in their own tongue, the wonderful works of God,—the sea saying ‘It is not in me,’ everything giving up any title to anything like substance, beyond being the result of one Supreme Will. The more chemistry, and electrology, and life, are searched into by the keenest and most remorseless experiment, the more do we find ourselves admitting that motive power and force, as manifested to us, is derived, is in its essence immaterial, is direct from Him in whom we live and move, and to whom, in a sense quite peculiar, belongeth power.”

This is fine, it is eloquent, it is likeable; but one cannot call it lucid. Indeed, if interpreted literally, it is incoherent, for the end contradicts the beginning. “Abstain from excess of theory or speculation,” it substantially says, “for theory and speculation, when prosecuted to the very utmost, lead to a profound religiousness.” This is the only verbal construction of the passage; but it is the very opposite of what was meant.

It is much the same with Dr. John Brown in smaller matters. If he wants a definition or a distinction on any subject, he generally protests first against the desire for definitions and distinctions, maintaining the superiority of healthy practical sense and feeling over mere theory; then he produces, in his own words, some “middle axiom,” or passable first-hand notion on the subject, as sufficient for the purpose if anything theoretical is wanted; and then he proceeds to back this up by interesting quotations from favourite and accredited authors. In short, Dr. John Brown lived in an element of the “middle propositions,” the accredited axioms, on all subjects, and was impatient of reasoning, novelty of theory, or search for ultimate principles. It is but the same thing in another form,—though it deserves separate statement,—to say that he disliked controversy. He shrank from controversy in all matters, social as well as intellectual; was irritated when it came near him; and kept rather on the conservative side in any new “cause” or “movement” that was exciting his neighbourhood. Perhaps the most marked exception in his writings to this disposition to rest in existing social arrangements, and also to his prevailing dislike of speculation, was his assertion of his unhesitating assent to that extreme development of Adam Smith’s doctrines which would abolish the system of state-licensing for particular professions, or at all events for the profession of Medicine. He advocates this principle more than once in his papers, and he signifies his adherence to it in almost the last words he wrote. “I am more convinced than ever,” he says in the prefatory note to the collected edition of his Horæ Subsecivæ, “of the futility and worse of the Licensing System, and think, with Adam Smith, that a mediciner should be as free to exercise his gifts as an architect or a mole-catcher. The public has its own shrewd way of knowing who should build its house or catch its moles, and it may quite safely be left to take the same line in choosing its doctor.” This is bold enough, and speculative enough; but the fact is that this acceptance of the principle of absolute laissez-faire, or non-interference of the state, or any other authority, in Medicine, or in any analogous art or craft, was facilitated for him by his hereditary Voluntaryism in Church matters, and indeed came to him ready-made in that form. What is surprising, and what corroborates our view of the essentially non-theoretical character of his intellect, is the unsystematic manner in which he was content to hold his principle, his failure to carry it out consistently, his apparent inability to perceive the full sweep of its logical consequences. Thus, to the words just quoted he appends these,—“Lawyers, of course, are different, as they have to do with the state, with the law of the land.” Was there ever a more innocent non sequitur? If any one may set up as a curer of diseases and make a living in that craft by charging fees from those who choose to employ him, why may not any one set up as a lawyer, and why may not I select and employ any one I please to plead my cause in court, instead of being bound to employ one of a limited number of wigged and gowned gentlemen?