§ 280
Fifth Edition
This incontrovertible axiom of experience is the standard of measurement by which the doses of all homoeopathic medicines, without exception, are to be reduced to such an extent that after their ingestion, they shall excite a scarcely observable homoeopathic aggravation, let the diminution of the dose go ever so far, and appear ever so incredible to the materialistic ideas of ordinary physicians;1 their idle declamations must before the verdict of unerring experience.
1 Let them learn from the mathematicians how true it is that a substance divided into ever so many parts must still contain in its smallest conceivable parts always some of this substance, and that the smallest conceivable part does not cease to be some of this substance and cannot possibly become nothing; – let them, if they are capable of being taught, hear from natural philosophers that there are enormously, powerful things (forces) which are perfectly destitute of weight, as, for example, caloric, light, etc., consequently infinitely lighter than the medicine contained in the smallest doses used in homoeopathy; – let them, if they can, weigh the irritating words that bring on a bilious fever, or the mournful intelligence respecting her only son that kills the mother; let them touch, for a quarter of an hour, a magnet capable of lifting a hundred pounds weight, and learn from the pain it excites that even imponderable agencies can produce the most violent medicinal effects upon man; – and let the weak ones among them allow the pit of the stomach to be slightly touched by the thumb’s point of a strong-willed mesmeriser for a few minutes, and the disagreeable sensations they then suffer will make them repent of attempting to set limits to the boundless activity of nature; the weak-minded creatures!
If the allopathist who is trying the homoeopathic system imagine he cannot bring himself to give such small and profoundly attenuated doses, let him only ask himself what risk he runs by so doing? If the scepticism which holds what is ponderable only to be real, and all that is imponderable to be nothing, be right, nothing worse could result from a dose that appears to him to be nothing, than that no effect would ensue – and consequently this would be always much more innocuous than what must result from his too large doses of allopathic medicine. Why will he consider his inexperience, coupled with prejudice, more reliable than an experience of many years corroboration by facts? And, moreover, the homoeopathic medicine becomes potentized at every division and diminution by trituration or succussion! – a development of the inherent powers of medicinal substances which was never dreamed of before my time, and which is of so powerful a character that of late I have been compelled by convincing experience to reduce the ten succussions formerly directed to be given after each attenuation, to two.
§ 280 Sixth Edition
The dose of the medicine that continues serviceable without producing new troublesome symptoms is to be continued while gradually ascending, so long as the patient with general improvement, begins to feel in a mild degree the return of one or several old original complaints. This indicates an approaching cure through a gradual ascending of the moderate doses modified each time by succussion (§ 247). It indicates that the vital principal no longer needs to be affected by the similar medicinal disease in order to lose the sensation of the natural disease (§ 148). It indicates that the life principle now free from the natural disease begins to suffer only something of the medicinal disease hitherto known as homoeopathic aggravation.
