Aphorisms & Precepts



Materia Medica never inspires perception. The physician must have the love of its use, and he becomes wise in proportion as he loves his use, and in proportion as he lives uprightly with his patients; that is, desires to heal them; beautify their souls. Can the physician, who does not love his neighbour as himself, get into this position?

One can never look from the toxic, to see what is in harmony with the dynamic, but may look from the dynamic to see what is in harmony with the toxic.

Toxicology shows the ability, or the extent of the effects of a drug.

All human beings have like possibilities of degradation; so we cannot look down on any member of the human race. We sometimes find the lowest, characteristics that are the noblest.

You cannot meditate on even the extreme of the human race. It becomes your solemn duty to heal the good, bad, and indifferent.

Does any one know what Chemical Affinity is, except that certain substances seek to take a liking to each other?

If it were not for the Simple Substance, such states as antipathy, sympathy, or affinity, could not be. It is the sphere of Homoeopathy to deal with these things; to glean what is the real Esse and existence.

There are two worlds; the world of thought, or immaterial substance, and the world of matter or material substance.

What reason has man to say that Energy or Force is first? Energy is not energy per se, but a powerful substance. The very Esse of God is a scientific study.

Bodies are not drawn together by means of their bodies, but by means of their Primitive Substance.

The Simple Substance is the means of identification in nature. The mineral, the oak, the wheat, are all identified by their Primitive Substance, and exist, only, because of their Primitive Substance, which makes them what they are.

Name everything that is, or moves; it is sustained from, and by power of this Primitive Substance. We do not argue that it is first power, but this is first substance.

Susceptibility is only a name for a state that underlies all possible sickness and all possible cure.

Now when a person becomes sick, he becomes susceptible to a certain remedy, which will affect him in its highest potency; while upon a healthy person it will have no effect.

When the dose is too large to cure, man receives it as a sickness.

Susceptibility exists in the Vital Force, and not in the tissues. Measles and Smallpox are not on the outside. Man is protected on the outside, and is attacked from the inside when there is susceptibility.

There are degrees in susceptibility. The Old School calls a certain kind of susceptibility “Idiosyncrasy,” though they have failed to find out what this is.

Think how susceptible a man is to sickness, when the Rhus vine will poison him when he is on the windward side, half a mile away.

An individual may be susceptible to nothing else; gross, coarse, vigorous in constitution; yet there is one thing he is susceptible to, and that is what he needs.

The signs are visible, but the Esse is invisible

The tendency of the human mind to run after things visible, that can be felt with the fingers, leads one to adopt foolish theories like the Bacteria doctrine and the Molecular theory.

A Physician above all men if not innocent should be anything else but a doctor. A bad man has only coarse, vicious ideas of the human heart.

When a man thinks from the microscope, and his neighbour’s opinion, he thinks falsely. Nothing good can come from this. Evil must take place, and changes, which are the ultimates of his internal thought, will take place in the body.

The time may come when Homoeopathy of the purer kind will be popular, but it is a very long time ahead.

Some have been confused by primary and secondary effects of medicine. You need not worry over this. You only need to know that certain symptoms follow each other. Primary and secondary action reverse themselves in different individuals.

The sharper the edge of the tool you fool with the more harm you can do; so it is with high potencies in unskilled hands.

A remedy is not known simply because it has been used upon the sick. That is a confirmation only, and gives more ripened knowledge.

The rational mind can go far beyond the idea of a molecule.

The Homoeopathic physician who thinks in quantities only, has such a crude mind that he cannot realize true Homoeopathy.

The old Philosophers were engaged in constant controversy, here converging, there diverging. If they had only known something of Simple Substance, as does the Homoeopath, they would have had confirmation.

In chemistry one colour obliterates another. This is an illustration of the outermost changes. The causes of such change lie in the primitive substance and not in the external form; so it is with the causes of cure.

Homoeopaths have a consciousness of what life is, what the life force is, what the nature of disease is, and can apply to all theories of the world our measure and test them. They can realize the philosophies.

There is nothing in the outer world but what is representative.

The song that is within the heart is a million times more intense, more beautiful, than can be produced by the larynx. Everything that is, or appears as real before the eyes, or to the ear in sound, is only representation of the real world; because everything of this character is perishable.

All Art has its Internal and External. If music is in the soul it will give the outward reflected image of the delight which is song.

The world today accepts things perfectly incongruous and calls them science. Modern science accepts nothing which cannot be heard, felt, or seen.

Take a body of scientific men: after a lengthy discussion the conclusion is, that “we have concluded so and so,” by the majority, after a general average is taken, and the conclusion is Science.

The microscopist has failed to show that there is no Vital Force, no Simple Substance, no Dynamis in drugs seen, and how can we expect him to foretell when the substance cannot be seen?

The different Philosophies do not agree about the Simple Substance, upon which they all touch in theory. They have no confirmation which could be had in the Homoeopathic potencies, and in their action upon the sick.

The personal stamp is upon every disease and upon every proving, and the individual must be permitted to stamp himself upon the disease as well as upon the proving.

There are no two things alike in the universe. This is so of diseases and of sick people, of thousands of crystals of the same salt. No two stars are alike. When this thought presents itself to the mind of the physician, he can see that no remedy can be substituted for another.

A disease may be suppressed by a medicine as well as by a stronger dissimilar disease.

In Epilepsy, so long as Bromides suppress, nature is paying more attention to the disease of Bromides than to the disease of Epilepsy.

Epilepsy is not a disease; you cannot prescribe for Epilepsy. The symptoms which represent the nature of the sickness are not in the fit, but those which the patient has had in infancy up to the time of the fit.

The Homoeopathic remedy only becomes Homoeopathic when it has established its curative relation; the relation between two dynamic influences.

Homoeopathicity is the relation between the symptoms of the patient and the remedy which will cure.

Homoeopathy is an applied science not a theory.

It is an injustice to Science to practice without exact knowledge and reasons for what you do. The whole world is but a swirl of this round about inheritance instead of knowledge.

If we could accept opinion we should have to go back to Allopathy, because we find there only a record of man’s experiments; a mass of heterogeneous opinions.

Experience teaches the Allopath to give Muriatic acid in Germany for Typhoid Fever, Nitric acid in England, cold bathing in Paris for the same. This is the doctrine of the Old School by “experience.”

It is an injustice to one’s self to remain in bigotry, intolerance and hatred.

When you have discovered that this Life Force resides in a simple substance you see at once that death is not an entity. The body has no life of its own and therefore it cannot die.

Therefore there is no death, but we do observe and perceive that there is a separation, of one that is alive from another that never was alive; a disjunction of that which lives from that which never lived.

That changes in the body correspond to wrong thinking is true. The fault of the world today, is reasoning from externals. Man elected in the early part of his history to think from lasts to firsts, and thereby lost his ability to know.

One sick man is to be treated, not the disease.

Man must be studied as he is, as he was, everything of man and of the human race in general, in order to understand disease.

In proportion as man thinks against everything, his country, his God, his neighbour, he wills in favor of himself. Therefore this forms man into the nature of his affections.

Thus man wills against everything but himself. In proportion as he does this he becomes a form of hatred, or a form of self love; he is that. Allow this to proceed and ultimates are inevitable.

James Tyler Kent
James Tyler Kent (1849–1916) was an American physician. Prior to his involvement with homeopathy, Kent had practiced conventional medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. He discovered and "converted" to homeopathy as a result of his wife's recovery from a serious ailment using homeopathic methods.
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.