BAXTER.
Few things in this world are useless,—none indeed but what are of man's own invention. It was one of Oberlin's wise maxims that nothing should be destroyed, nothing thrown away, or wasted; he knew that every kind of refuse which will not serve to feed pigs, may be made to feed both man and beast in another way by serving for manure: perhaps he learnt this from the Chinese proverb, that a wise man saves even the parings of his nails and the clippings of his beard, for this purpose. “To burn a hair,” says Darwin, “or a straw, unnecessarily, diminishes the sum of matter fit for quick nutrition, by decomposing it nearly into its elements: and should therefore give some compunction to a mind of universal sympathy.” Let not this cant about universal sympathy nauseate a reader of common sense, and make him regard Darwin's opinion here with the contempt which his affectation deserves. Every thing may be of use to the farmer. And so it is with knowledge; there is none, however vain in itself and however little it may be worth the pains of acquiring it, which may not at some time or other be turned to account.
Peter Hopkins found that his acquaintance with astrology was sometimes of good service in his professional practice. In his days most of the Almanacs contained Rules Astrological showing under what aspects and positions different modes of remedy were to be administered, and different complections were to let blood. He had often to deal with persons who believed in their Almanack as implicitly as in their Bible, and who studied this part of it with a more anxious sense of its practical importance to themselves. When these notions were opposed to the course of proceeding which the case required, he could gain his point by talking to them in their own language, and displaying, if it were called for, a knowledge of the art which might have astonished the Almanack-maker himself. If he had reasoned with them upon any other ground, they would have retained their own opinion, even while they submitted to his authority; and would neither have had faith in him, nor in his prescriptions.
Peter Hopkins would never listen to any patient who proposed waiting for a lucky day before he entered upon a prescribed course of medicine. “Go by the moon as much as you please,” he would say; “have your hair cut, if you think best while it wexes, and cut your corns while it wanes; and put off any thing till a lucky day that may as well be done on one day as another. But the right day to be bled is when you want bleeding; the right day for taking physic is when physic is necessary.”
He was the better able to take this course, because he himself belonged to the debateable land between credulity and unbelief. Some one has said that the Devil's dubitative is a negative,—dubius in fide, infidelis est;1 and there are cases, as in Othello's, in which from the infirmity of human nature, it is too often seen that
to be once in doubt
Is—once to be resolved.
1 SEXTUS PYTHAGORAS.
There is however a state of mind, or to speak more accurately a way of thinking, in which men reverse the Welshman's conclusion in the old comedy, and instead of saying ‘it may be, but it is very impossible,’ resolve within themselves that it is very impossible, but it may be. So it was in some degree with Peter Hopkins; his education, his early pursuits, and his turn of mind disposed him to take part with what was then the common opinion of common men, and counterbalanced, if they did not perhaps a little preponderate against the intelligence of the age, and his own deliberate judgment if he had been called upon seriously to declare it. He saw plainly that astrology had been made a craft by means whereof knaves practised upon fools; but so had his own profession; and it no more followed as a necessary consequence from the one admission that the heavenly bodies exercised no direct influence upon the human frame, than it did from the other that the art of medicine was not beneficial to mankind.
In the high days of astrology when such an immediate influence was affirmed upon the then undisputed authority of St. Augustin, it was asked how it happened that the professors of this science so frequently deceived others, and were deceived themselves? The answer was that too often instead of confining themselves within the legitimate limits of the art, they enlarged their phylacteries too much. Farther, that there were many more fixed stars than were known to us, yet these also must have their influence; and moreover that the most learned professors differed upon some of the most important points. Nevertheless so many causes and effects in the course of nature were so visibly connected, that men, whether astrologers or not, drew from them their own conclusions, and presaged accordingly: mirum non est, si his et similibus solerter pensiculatis, non tam astrologi quam philosophi, medici, et longâ experientiâ edocti agricolæ et nautæ, quotidie de futuris multa vera predicunt, etiam sine astrologiæ regulis de morbis, de annonâ, deque tempestatibus.