Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

198 Aristotle and his schoolsmall movements escape our notice because they are overruled by morepowerful ones, whereas in sleep, as a result of the lack of input of strongactual movements, the small ones get a chance to present themselves. Thisprinciple is demonstrated by means of a number of examples derived fromcommon experience (no. 2 on the list above). The second principle is thatthe origins of all things (including diseases) are small and therefore belongto the category of small movements. The two principles are combined inthe form of a syllogism at the end of the paragraph.These points are most relevant for an assessment of what Aristotle is doingin the passage under discussion. It has, of course, long been recognisedby commentators that the sentence 463 a 4–5 may very well be a referenceto the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen, the fourth book of which dealswith dreams and which I quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Althoughthe Hippocratic Corpus contains several examples of the use of dreams asprognostic or diagnostic clues, 49 we nowhere find such an explicit theoreticalfoundation of this as in this book. It is chronologically possible andplausible that Aristotle knew this treatise, because other places in the Parvanaturalia show a close similarity of doctrine to On Regimen. 50 That he isreferring to it here becomes more likely when we consider that the writerof On Regimen certainly meets Aristotle’s requirements for being a charieisiatros. Moreover, the author’s approach must have appealed to Aristotle forthe very fact that the interest of dreams is that they reveal the causes ofdiseases.However, these similarities should not conceal the fundamental differenceof approach between the medical writer and Aristotle. This differencenot only manifests itself in that Aristotle, as a natural scientist, is only interestedin the causal relationship between the dream and the event, whereasOn Regimen is primarily a text about regimen (both from a preventive andfrom a therapeutic point of view), which explains the great amount of detailedattention paid to the interpretation of the contents of dreams andto prescriptions about preventive dietetic measures. The most importantdifference lies in the psycho-physiological explanation of the significanceof dreams given by the two authors. The author of On Regimen appeals toa rather ‘dualistic’ conception of the relation between soul and body, of thetype referred to earlier on in this chapter:49 See the instances listed in van der Eijk (1994) 279. The most explicit statement apart from On Regimen86 is ch. 45 of the treatise On Sevens, but this is considered by most scholars to be post-Aristotelian.50 On this see W. D. Ross (1955) 56–7, who points out that Aristotle’s ‘comparison of the heart-lungsystem to a double bellows [in De respiratione 480 a 20–3] is clearly borrowed from Vict.’; see alsoByl (1980) 321 n. 32 and 325, and Lefèvre (1972) 203–14.