We will take up today the study of the last part of the third paragraph relating to the fixed principles by which the physician must be guided. In time past, outside of the doctrinal statements of Homoeopathy, medicine has never been a matter of experience, and medicine today, outside of Homoeopathy, is a “medicine of experience.” Now, in order that the mind may be open to receive the doctrines, it is necessary that the exact and proper position of experience should be realized. If the true conception of law and doctrine, order and government, prevailed in man’s mind he would not be forever hatching out theories, as they would not be necessary, and moreover he would be wise enough to know and see clearly what is truth and what is folly.
Experience has a place in science, but only a confirmatory place. It can only confirm that which has been discovered through principle or law guiding in the proper direction. Experience lead to no discoveries, but when man is fully indoctrinated in principle that which he observes by experience may confirm the things that are consistent with law.
One who has no doctrines, no truth no law, who does not relay upon law for everything, imagines he discovers by experience. Out of his experience he will undertake to invent, and his inventions run in every conceivable direction; hence we may see in this century a medical convention of a thousand physicians who rely entirely upon experience, at which one will arise and relate his experience, and another will arise and tell his experience, and the talkers of that convention continue to debate and no two talkers agree.
When they have finished they compare their experiences and that which they settle upon they call science, no matter how far they may be from the truth. Next year they come back and they have different ideas and have had different experiences, and they then vote out what they voted in before. This is the medicine of experiences. They confirm nothing, but make from experience a series of inventions and theories. This is the wrong direction.
The science of medicine must be built on a true foundation. To be sure, man must observe, but there is a difference between true observation in a science under law and principle and the experience of a man who has no law and no principle. Old- fashioned medicine denies principle and law, calls its system the medicine of experience, and hence its doctrines are kaleidoscopic, changing every year and never appearing twice alike.
Let me again impress the necessity of knowing something about the internal government of man in order to know how disease develops and travels, If we observe any government, the government of the universe, civil government, the government of commerce, physical government, we find that there is one centre that rules and controls and is supreme. A man has within him by endowment of the Divine a supreme centre of government which is in the grey matter of the cerebrum and in the highest portion of the grey matter.
Everything in man, and everything that takes place in man, is prescribed over primarily by this centre, from centre to circumference. If man is injured from the external, e.g., if he has his finger torn, it will soon be repaired; the order which is in the economy from centre to circumference will repair every wrong that is on the surface caused by external violence. The order of repair is the same in external as in internal violence. Injuries are external violence, but diseases are internal disorder performing violence. All true diseases of the economy flow from centre to circumference. All miasms are true diseases.
In the government of man there is a triad, a first, second and third, which gives direction, viz.: the cerebrum, cerebellum and spinal cord, or when taken more collectively or generally, the brain, spinal cord and the nerves. Considered more internally, we have the will and understanding forming a unit making the interior man; the vital force or viceregent of the soul (that is, the limbs or soul stuff, the formative substance) which is immaterial; and then the body which is material, Thus from the innermost, the will or voluntary principle, through the limbus or simple substance to the outermost, the actual or material substance of man, which is in every cell, we have this order of direction. Every cell in man has its representative of the innermost, the middle and the outermost; there is no cell in man that does not have its will and understanding, its soul stuff or limbus or simple substance, and its material substance.
In 1881, Kent accepted a position as professor of anatomy at the Homeopathic College of Missouri, an institution with which he remained affiliated until 1888. In 1890, Kent moved to Pennsylvania to take a position as Dean of Professors at the Post-Graduate Homeopathic Medical School of Philadelphia. In 1897 Kent published his magnum opus, Repertory of the Homœopathic Materia Medica. Kent moved to Chicago in 1903, where he taught at Hahnemann Medical College.