Medicine and Mysticism. By R. 0. Moon. (Longmans Green.
28. 6d.) t IN his Seriou-s Call, Law wrote : " The soul and the body are so united that they have each of them power over one another in their actions. Certain thoughts and -sentiments in the soul produce such and such motions or :actions- in the body, and, on the other hand, certain motions and actions of the bodyhave the same power of raising such and such thoughts and sentiments in the Soul." Thoughtful' physicians, impressed by—but hot satisfied with—the achievements of post-Renaissance science, are feeling their - Way towards a position not far removed from that of Law. The non- specialist mind generally indulges in some sort of vague mysticism when speculating on the nature of disease. Inevit- ably, therefore, charlatans who care to exploit this tendency of popular thought rarely fail to secure a following. Conven- tional doctors, on the other hand, noting how frequently an 'assumption of mysticism serves' as a cloak for ignorance, have been inclined to over-stress the phenomenal aspects of things ; espeCially of the workings of the" body in health
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Di. Moon holds, as did Hippocrates, that the true physician must also be a phildsopher ; and " shoUld at least attempt to have some, imaginative apprehension of the ultimate meaning Of life, while recognizing that his knowledge is confined to` the Phenomenal world." For the author of this interesting little book is no despiser of science, the basic importance of which in the medical art he considers estab- lished beyond all question. All he asks is that we should recognize the limitations of science, and not imagine that, in Schelling's words, a universe can be constructed " by heaping up grains of sand." It is the mysticism of Plotinus, and not that of the East, which we are invited to contem- plate ; for Dr. Moon attributes the apparent relative absence of materialism in the East not so much to the possession of a supra-sensuous philosophy as to passivity and lethargy, and a sort of lazy indifference to the everyday happenings of human life.
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