You arrive thus, step by
step, to a perfect equality between the two armies. What will decide
then? luck, that is to say an unforeseen event, a general officer killed
when he is on his way to execute an important order, a corps which is
shaken by a false rumour, a panic and a thousand other cases which
cannot be remedied by prudence; but it still remains certain that there
is an art, a generalship.
As much must be said of medicine, of this art of operating on the head
and the hand, to restore life to a man who is about to lose it.
The first man who at the right moment bled and purged a sufferer from an
apoplectic fit; the first man who thought of plunging a knife into the
bladder in order to extract a stone, and of closing the wound again; the
first man who knew how to stop gangrene in a part of the body, were
without a doubt almost divine persons, and did not resemble Moliere's
doctors.
Descend from this obvious example to experiments that are less striking
and more equivocal; you see fevers, ills of all kinds which are cured,
without it being well proved if it be nature or the doctor who has cured
them; you see diseases of which the result cannot be guessed; twenty
doctors are deceived; the one that has the most intelligence, the surest
eye, guesses the character of the malady. There is therefore an art; and
the superior man knows the finenesses of it.
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