anarchist, not an
innovator or reformer, and subjectivism in ancient philosophy remained a
skeptical attitude which could destroy but could not build up.

Hippocrates and his school came nearer consciously using the experience
of the individual as the actual material of the object of knowledge. In
the skeptical period in which they flourished they rejected on the one
hand the magic of traditional medicine and on the other the empty
theorizing that had been called out among the physicians by the
philosophers. Their practical tasks held them to immediate experience.
Their functions in the gymnasia gave their medicine an interest in
health as well as in disease, and directed their attention largely
toward diet, exercise, and climate in the treatment even of disease. In
its study they have left the most admirable sets of observations,
including even accounts of acknowledged errors and the results of
different treatments of cases, which ancient science can present. It was
the misfortune of their science that it dealt with a complicated
subject-matter dependent for its successful treatment upon the whole
body of physical, chemical, and biological disciplines as well as the
discovery and invention of complicated techniques. They were forced
after all to adopt a hopelessly inadequate physiological theory--that of
the four humors--with the corresponding doctrine of health and disease
as the proper and improper mixture of these fluids. Their marvelously
fine observation of symptoms led only to the definition of types and a
medical practice which was capable of no consistent progress outside of
certain fields of surgery. Thus even Greek medicine was unable to
develop a different type of scientific method except in so far as it
kept alive an empiricism which played a not unimportant part in
post-Aristotelian philosophy. Within the field of astronomy in
explaining the anomalies of the heavens involved in their metaphysical
assumptions, they built up a marvelously perfect Euclidian geometry, for
here refined and exhaustive definition of all the elements was possible.
The problems involved in propositions to be proved appeared in the
individual experience of the geometrician, but this experience in space
was uniform with that of every one else and took on a universal not an
individual form. The test of the solution was given in a demonstration
which holds for every one living in the same Euclidian space. When the
mathematician found h