Obervation Is A Passive Science, Experimentation Is

Descriptive Anatomy Is To Physiology What Geography Is To History, And Just As It Is Not Enough To Know The Typography Of A Country To Understand Its History, So Also It Is Not Enough To Know The Anatomy Of Organs To Understand Their Functions.

Laplace Considers Astronomy A Science Of Observation, Because We Can Only Observe The Movements Of The Planets; We Cannot Reach Them, Indeed, To Alter Their Course And To Experiment With Them. "on Earth," Said Laplace, "we Make Phenomena Vary By Experiments; In The Sky, We Carefully Define All The Phenomena Presented To Us By Celestial Motion." Certain Physicians Call Medicine A Science Of Observations, Because They Wrongly Think That Experimentation Is Inapplicable To It.

I Do Not ... Reject The Use Of Statistics In Medicine, But I Condemn Not Trying To Get Beyond Them And Believing In Statistics As The Foundation Of Medical Science. ... Statistics ... Apply Only To Cases In Which The Cause Of The Facts Observed Is Still [uncertain Or] Indeterminate. ... There Will Always Be Some Indeterminism ... In All The Sciences, And More In Medicine Than In Any Other. But Man's Intellectual Conquest Consists In Lessening And Driving Back Indeterminism In Proportion As He Gains Ground For Determinism By The Help Of The Experimental Method.

The Mental Never Influences The Physical. It Is Always The Physical That Modifies The Mental, And When We Think That The Mind Is Diseased, It Is Always An Illusion.

We Must Never Make Experiments To Confirm Our Ideas, But Simply To Control Them.