“He who can cure disease is a physician. Neither emperors nor popes, neither colleges nor high schools can create physicians. They can confer privileges and cause a person who is not a physician to appear as if he were one; they can give him permission to kill, but they cannot give him the power to cure; they cannot make him a real physician if he has not already been ordained by God. The true physician does not brag about his cleverness or praise his medicines or seek to monopolize the right of robbing the patient; for he knows that the work must praise the master, and not the master the work. There is a knowledge which is derived from man, and another knowledge which is derived from God through the light of nature. He who has not been born to be a physician will never succeed. A physician should be faithful and charitable. He who loves only himself and his own pocket will be of little benefit to the sick. Medicine is much more an art than a science. To know the experience of others is useful to a physician; but all the learning of books cannot make a man a physician, unless he is one by nature. Medical wisdom is only given by God.” (Comp. “Paragranum,” i. 4.)
“He who can cure disease is a physician. Neither emperors nor popes, neither colleges nor high schools can create physicians. They can confer privileges and cause a person who is not a physician to appear as if he were one; they can give him permission to kill, but they cannot give him the power to cure; they cannot make him a real physician if he has not already been ordained by God. The true physician does not brag about his cleverness or praise his medicines or seek to monopolize the right of robbing the patient; for he knows that the work must praise the master, and not the master the work. There is a knowledge which is derived from man, and another knowledge which is derived from God through the light of nature. He who has not been born to be a physician will never succeed. A physician should be faithful and charitable. He who loves only himself and his own pocket will be of little benefit to the sick. Medicine is much more an art than a science. To know the experience of others is useful to a physician; but all the learning of books cannot make a man a physician, unless he is one by nature. Medical wisdom is only given by God.” (Comp. “Paragranum,” i. 4.)
This virtue which constitutes the true physician cannot be created by colleges, nor can it be conferred by anyone personally upon himself. No one can confer upon himself a thing which he does not possess, or without the aid ofany higher influence make himself better than that which he is; because, as has been explained above, the power exercised by any form is not the creation of the form, but an eternal principle, entering into objective existence in forms and becoming manifested in and through them by its own power. Neither truth nor wisdom can be manufactured; they exist independently of all opinions, observations, speculation, and logic; they may be hidden from our sight like the sun on a rainy day; but as the sun is independent of our being aware of his presence, so the truth exists eternally whether or not it is acknowledged by us. If the whole generation of mankind at present walking this earth should turn into idiots, the truth would not therefore cease to be, but would become manifested again as wisdom in a more enlightened age.
Nothing can rise to heaven but what has descended from it, we can only by overcoming that which is false render ourselves receptive for that which is true.Eckhartsays:—“Divine Wisdom is to God what the sunlight is to the sun; it is one with Him, a necessary activity, a never dying fountain, having its source in the heart of God.”
This brings us back again to areligiousbasis (if we are permitted to use this ill-treated and misunderstood term), and to the necessity that he who makes it his profession to employ the laws of nature and treat the body of man should know the position which man occupies in nature and the position which nature occupies in regard to the origin from which it originates.
This science requires not mere words, but self-knowledge. Wisdom can only be taught by Wisdom itself; but a science based upon a recognition of truth disperses the clouds which prevent the light of the truth from entering into the heart and becoming incorporated and manifested in man.