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Credulity has been justly defined, Belief without Reason. Scepticism is its opposite, Reason without Belief and is the natural and invariable consequence of credulity: for it may be generally observed, that men who believe without reason, are succeeded by others whom no reasoning can convince; a fact which has occasioned many extraordinary and violent revolutions in the Materia Medica, and a knowledge of it will enable us to explain the otherwise unaccountable rise and fall of many useless, as well as important articles. It will also suggest to the reflecting practitioner, a caution of great moment, to avoid the dangerous fault imputed to Galen by Dioscorides, of ascribing too many and too great virtues to one and the same medicine. By bestowing unworthy and extravagant praise upon a remedy, we in reality do but detract from its reputation,^[36] and run the risk of banishing it from practice; for when the sober practitioner discovers by experience that a medicine falls so far short of the efficacy ascribed to it, he abandons its use in disgust, and is even unwilling to concede to it that degree of merit to which in truth and justice it may be entitled; the inflated eulogiums bestowed upon the operation of Digitalis in pulmonary diseases, excited, for a time, a very unfair impression against its use; and the injudicious manner in which the antisyphilitic powers of Nitric Acid have been aggrandised, had very nearly exploded a valuable auxiliary from modern practice.

It is well known with what avidity the public embraced the expectations given by Stöerk of Vienna in 1760, with respect to the efficacy of Hemlock; every body, says Dr. Fothergill, made the extract, and every body prescribed it, but finding that it would not perform the wonders ascribed to it, and that a multitude of discordant diseases refused to yield, as it was asserted they would, to its narcotic powers, practitioners fell into the opposite extreme of absurdity, and declaring that it could do nothing at all, dismissed it at once as inert and useless. Can we not then predict the fate of the Cubebs, which has been lately restored to notice with such extravagant praise and unqualified approbation? May the sanguine advocates for the virtues of the Colchicum derive a useful lesson of practical caution from these precepts: it would be a matter of regret that a remedy which, under skilful management, certainly possesses considerable virtue, should again fall into obscurity and neglect from the disgust excited by the extravagant zeal of its supporters.

There are, moreover, those who cherish a spirit of scepticism, from an idea that it denotes the exercise of a superior intellect; it must be admitted, that at that period in the history of Europe, when reason first began to throw off the yoke of authority, it required superiority of understanding as well as intrepidity of conduct, to resist the powers of that superstition which had so long held it in captivity; but in the present age, observes Mr. Dugald Stewart, “unlimited scepticism is as much the child of imbecility as implicit credulity.” “He who at the end of the eighteenth century,” says Rousseau, “has brought himself to abandon all his early principles, without discrimination, would probably have been a bigot in the days of the league.”