The second phase of homeopathy began with the rejection of allopathy (meaning, based on no guiding principles whatsoever) and antipathy (using the concept of contraries). The genius of Samuel Hahnemann was that he took one of several medical concepts, healing with similar substances, and provided convincing evidence that it was the natural law of cure. The other approaches were suppressive, damaging or palliative. Hahnemann then provided the means to apply it systematically to individual cases of disease. An idea is of little use if it remains a theory and cannot be systematically applied, as Hahnemann argued, on the basis of “easily comprehensible principles”.

Hahnemann provided the means through the use of provings on healthy persons (a concept again which he had not invented, but used more systematically). These provings generated the materia medica pura. He also provided a means in the serendipitous discovery of the power of potentisation, which opened the door to healing through the use of bio-energy. All of this was set out in a series of writings which culminated in the publication of the first full description of this “new” method of healing Hahnemann chose to call homeopathy (similar suffering). This is the homeopathy of symptomology.

Hahnemann roundly rejected the allopathic attempt to find the cause of disease through dissection, chemical analysis, and endless theories. He ridiculed the allopathic battle cry, tolle causem (find the cause) and asserted that one could only know disease through the full individual (characteristic) symptoms of each sick person, the totality of symptoms. These were the language of the inner disturbance. One could not see the disturbance in health except through the outer expression graspable by the senses, the symptoms of the patient.

Here homeopathy is firmly established as a symptomological universe. The cause of the disturbance to the vital force revolves around the symptoms produced by that disturbance. The proper focus for the physician applying the new knowledge of disease was to be the symptoms, not the apparent cause (what Hahnemann ridiculed as the proximate cause). To say that one is depressed because the chemicals in the brain or the endocrine system are imbalanced is to identify a proximate cause, but this begs the question as to what caused the chemical imbalance.

The third phase of homeopathy began when Hahnemann, ever the perceptive and honest observer, noticed that despite brilliant and quick cures of his patients’ ailments, their underlying state of health often continued to worsen. Hahnemann faced a crisis of faith — either homeopathy was valid or it was not. He could not accept the latter and choose to look within homeopathy itself for the answer to his dilemma. Hahnemann was only working with a handful of remedies at the time, so he could have chosen to believe that the answer lay in the paucity of remedies and re-doubled his efforts at proving new remedies. He rejected this as the right explanation, however, on the grounds that the problem was not that the remedies had not acted, as they had, often brilliantly, but that they had not touched the underlying state of health (or ill-health) of the patient. This lead him to a twelve-year search for the answer to the problem.

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