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Title: The Church of St. Bunco
A Drastic Treatment of a Copyrighted Religion
Author: Gordon Clark
Release Date: June 2, 2012 [EBook #39895]
Language: English
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THE CHURCH OF ST. BUNCO
A DRASTIC TREATMENT OF A COPYRIGHTED
RELIGION--UN-CHRISTIAN NON-SCIENCE
BY GORDON CLARK
THE Abbey Press
PUBLISHERS
114 FIFTH AVENUE
London NEW YORK Montreal
Copyright, 1901,
by THE Abbey Press
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
Preface 7
I. A Bird's-eye View of the Thing 11
II. The Origin of the "New Thought" 15
III. Dr. Quimby's most Distinguished Patient 41
IV. A Great "Metaphysical" Novel 59
V. A Soft Set of Critics 74
VI. "The Precious Volume" 78
VII. "Key" to the Eddy Scripture, Science and Health 95
VIII. "Christian Science" Organizing Forces 108
IX. The One True "Mother Church" 120
X. A Martyr to "Science" 131
XI. Metaphysics 155
XII. Further Analysis of the Universe 165
XIII. A Special Look at Space and Time 180
XIV. Creative Mind Further Probed 186
XV. The Genesis of "Transcendental" Ideas 193
XVI. The Grand Result of Dissecting Phenomena 196
XVII. Some Sequences of Absolute Idealism 206
XVIII. Various Schools of the "New Thought" 219
XIX. An Advanced Healer of To-day 232
XX. Conclusion 248
PREFACE.
The purpose of this book is not to deny the power of mind over matter, or
of the human mind over the human body, but to show that the foolish and
pestilent thing termed "Christian Science" is a leech fastened upon these
great truths, mostly, if not wholly, to batten on them.
There is no use of saying this to "Christian Scientists" themselves--an
obedient chain-gang in hypnotic servitude. But people who are not already
"in Science" (to use the shibboleth of those who are), ought to be
prompted not to get there. The best way in general, I think, is to show
that even the historical and biographical claims at the base of the
movement are false. If the personal veracity of the head of a church
cannot be trusted, "divine revelations," "miracles" and "mental medicine,"
proceeding from such a source, will naturally be accepted only by the very
soft, or else by the very hard for solid considerations.
Is there no sincerity, then, in "Christian Science"? Of course there is.
Even the "discoverer and founder" of it undoubtedly believes certain of
its asseverations. Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy must be credited, for instance,
with the conviction that she has some knowledge of "metaphysics"--a
conviction that is nothing worse than a pitiable mistake, which is
exploded here at some length. When, as a result of this mistake, she
teaches that matter is nothing--not even a condition of anything--only
sincerity can account for such lunacy. Yet herein "Christian Science" has
its whole rational, or rather irrational, breath of life.
Some "Christian Scientists" sincerely believe in an equivalent for "black
magic." As, in their view, "concentration of mind" can cure disease, they
think it can also throw disease upon enemies, or upon backsliders from
"science." It has been suggested even to the present writer that illness
might be cast upon him if he antagonized "the true faith." According to
certain dissidents from "Christian Science," "black magic," though with
much talk of "chastening love"--(every crime of religious hypocrisy is
always committed in the name of "love")--has been persistently tried on
heretical wanderers. In the natural course of time some of them are dead;
but those whom I have met are not only living, they are comfortably fat.
As "Christian Science" has to me no genuine basis, either in facts,
science, theology, metaphysics or therapeutics, but is a mendacious,
contradictory, pretentious humbug, I do not hesitate to use such weapons,
whether narration, logic, or satire, as are adapted to puncture it. We
hear that "Christian Science" has done good. So it has, in some instances,
but only through means which it pretends to repudiate, and through the
trustful ignorance of those who have been duped by it. We hear, also, that
"Christian Scientists" are specially "educated and intelligent." I deny
it. No one of them seems ever to have heard of the history of
philosophy--a cemetery in which have long lain buried the most of "Mother"
Eddy's "divine revelations," "original discoveries" and "absolute
demonstrations." Her followers can doubtless _read_, or they would not be
available as purchasers of her _Science and Health_; but, if they could
_think_, they never would have read the book through. From beginning to
end, it is simply a batch of self-contradictions and self-nullities. These
are capped with the most impudent claim ever uttered on earth--the claim
that the human mind in its natural state cannot comprehend the divine mind
incarnate in the author. If caustic is applied to such nonsense, there is
no need of apology. The only doubt is that the malefaction is worth the
burning.
G. C.
THE CHURCH OF ST. BUNCO.
CHAPTER I.
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE THING.
The date of this writing is the year 1901.
About a quarter of a century ago, Boston, the city of modified Puritans
and keen business thrift, evolved a new religion. Modern Boston, however,
being nothing if not "scientific," the new religion tipped its wings with
the new time, and soared aloft in the name of "Christian Science."
In a world not quite converted to this "science," facts sometimes fall
behind assertions. But the sect of Christian Science now claims to number
in its fold a million sheep. The "mother church," of course, is in Boston;
but daughter churches of every age and size are budding and blooming
throughout the earth. At headquarters Christian Science has its official
weekly organ, its official monthly magazine, and its official publishing
house. The cult has issued innumerable books, but specially the
multifarious editions of _Science and Health_, the chief work of the
adored "mother" and "founder" of Christian Science, Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy. As the latest edition of this sacred book is always the best, and as
the holy author carefully recommends it as such to all the
faithful--whatever other editions they possess--its very high price, under
copyright,[1] as compared with undivine books, has rendered it a
magnificent source of income. Then, as the average fee for blessing a
disciple of Christian Science with a dozen lessons in "metaphysics" and
"healing" has been three hundred dollars,[2] a grateful providence through
long years, has not only provided food and raiment for "Mother Eddy," but
a rich abundance, too, of such worldly goods as should adorn and stimulate
perfect piety, not excepting the whitest of diamonds, as symbols of
purity, for herself and the elect of her household. Why not? Her devotees
are strict adherents of Scripture--always as she interprets it for
them--and she believes, for all the text will yield, that "the laborer is
worthy of his hire."
Now, apart from the name and the church of Christian Science, there are
many people in Boston and its universal radiations--very intelligent and
honest people, too--who utterly discard Mrs. Eddy and her teachings, yet
hold the general doctrine on which she speculates--the now well-known
doctrine that mind governs matter, and that the soul can cure the body of
disease. The teaching of these people may simply be termed "mental
healing," though they say also "mental science," sometimes "metaphysics"
and comprehensively "the new thought."
Of late much has been said and written against Christian Science; but
adverse criticism has proceeded mostly from physicians in the interest of
their schools and theologians in the interest of their creeds. These good
souls have taken Christian Science seriously, like the innocent followers
of Mrs. Eddy herself. But as soon as a general investigator touches the
fad, especially the history of it, he sees that, whatever its effects may
have been--good, bad or indifferent--it began in false pretenses,[3] has
been pushed for money, and is one of the most shallow humbugs that ever
tricked an epoch in the cloak of religion, or reduced "metaphysics" to
lunacy. Hence our title. The Church of St. Bunco is the name for the
thing. "Christian Science," properly named, is simply _Un_-Christian
_Non_-Science.
CHAPTER II.
THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW THOUGHT.[4]
"Christian Science," "Mental Healing," "Metaphysical Treatment of
Disease,"--where did these things come from, and how did they get here?
The facts are peculiar; they are partly unpleasant; they are sometimes
amusing; but they are not far to seek.
In 1836, Charles Poyan, a Frenchman, introduced into the United States the
practise of Mesmerism. In 1840 it was taken up, with great earnestness, by
a Maine Yankee, named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. He was a watch and clock
maker, an inventor, and a natural reformer. In making his mesmeric
experiments, he soon found an extraordinary subject of them in the person
of a young man, Lucius Burkmar, with whom he traveled several years,
giving, it is said, some of the most astonishing exhibitions of mesmerism
and clairvoyance that had ever been known. As the substance of mesmerism,
though under the newer name of hypnotism, has now been fully substantiated
by the French Academy of Medicine, the highest authority in the world on
such subjects, there seems to be no longer any reasonable question of its
general claims.
On taking up mesmerism in New England, Mr. Quimby had been very ill and
given up by his physicians to die. By inquiring into his own condition
through his clairvoyant subject, Lucius, and by the young man's laying-on
of hands, Mr. Quimby, as he tells the story, recovered immediately from a
long-standing and dangerous malady. Partly as a result of this cure, but
much more because his whole life shows him to have been a natural exemplar
of "the good physician," he took to "healing the sick." He held no diploma
from any college of medicine; but his work and his thousands of patients
inevitably conferred upon him the title of "Doctor."
At first he merely co-operated with the regular medical faculty, who
sometimes called upon him to have his subject, Lucius, examine their
patients. Being put into the mesmeric state, young Burkmar would describe
the disease, with the pains accompanying it, and would then go on and
prescribe remedies, though he knew nothing about them.
As a participant and student of this process, Dr. Quimby came, in a short
time, to the conclusion that the diagnosis of the clairvoyant was not
necessarily the true one, but was taken from the belief of the patient, or
his physician, or some other person, and was, therefore, an impression of
incidental mind, rather than a statement of fact. Such results would not
do for a man like Quimby; so he dismissed mesmerism--such practise of it
at least as depended on anybody but himself and those on whom he directly
operated. Meanwhile, according to the best of testimony, there was
developed in himself a faculty much more peculiar and effective than
ordinary "mind-reading" and "second-sight." Gradually, too, he formed an
entirely new and original theory of disease. In 1857, in a Maine paper,
the _Bangor Jeffersonian_, his faculty and his theory were described thus:
"It is universally acknowledged that the mind is often the cause of
disease, but it has never been supposed to have an equal power in
overcoming it. Quimby's theory is that the mind gives immediate form to
the animal spirit, and that the animal spirit gives form to the body....
Therefore, his first course in the treatment of a patient is to sit down
beside him, and put himself _en rapport_ with him, which he does without
producing the mesmeric sleep.... With the spirit form Dr. Quimby converses
and endeavors to win it away from its grief; and, when he has succeeded in
doing so, it disappears, and reunites with the body. Thus is commenced the
first step towards recovery.... This union frequently lasts but a short
time, when the spirit again appears, exhibiting some new phase of its
troubles. With this he again contends until he overcomes it, when it
disappears as before. Thus two shades of trouble have disappeared from the
mind, and consequently from the animal spirit; and the body has already
commenced its efforts to come into a state in accordance with them."
In an article written by Dr. Quimby himself (in 1861), he explained his
procedure in this way:
"A patient comes to see Dr. Quimby. He renders himself absent to
everything but the impression of the person's feelings. These are quickly
daguerreotyped on him. They contain no intelligence, but shadow forth a
reflection of themselves which he looks at. This contains the disease as
it appears to the patient. Being confident that it is the shadow of a
false idea, he (Dr. Quimby) is not afraid of it.... Then his feelings in
regard to the disease, which are health and strength, are daguerreotyped
on the receptive plate of the patient, which also throws forth a shadow.
The patient, seeing this shadow of the disease in a new light, gains
confidence. This change of feeling is daguerreotyped on the doctor again.
This also throws forth a shadow, and he sees the change, and continues to
treat it in the same way. So the patient's feelings sympathize with his,
the shadow changes and grows dim, and finally disappears. The light takes
its place, and there is nothing left of the disease."
Dr. Quimby was not an educated man in the technical meaning of the term;
but, through his experiments in mesmerism and his personal experiences, he
was led directly to what in the history of philosophy is called "absolute
idealism." Until his own conclusions were fully reached, he knew nothing,
from literature, even of Berkeley; but when Berkeley's writings were
unfolded to him, he at once said, in his plain, straightforward way, that
they were true, and that he "agreed" with them. To him, the universe was
mind, and all things were "ideas." Disease was an "idea," though he
sometimes called it "matter," as being _negative mind_, or that which
"_could receive impressions_" and "be changed by them." Hence he said:
"The idea (disease) is matter; and it decomposes, and throws off an odor
that contains all the ideas of the person affected. This is true of every
idea or thought. Now my odor comes in contact with this odor, and I, being
well, have found out by twenty years' experience that these odors affect
me, and also that they contain the very identity of the patient whom this
odor surrounds. This called my attention to it; and I found that it was as
easy to tell the feelings or thoughts of a sick person as to detect the
odor of spirits from that of tobacco. I at first thought I inhaled it, but
at last found that my senses could be affected by it when my body was at a
distance of many miles from the patient. This led to a new discovery; and
I found that my senses were not in my body, but that my body was in my
senses. My knowledge located my senses just according to my wisdom. If a
man's knowledge is in matter, all there is of him is contained in matter.
But, if his knowledge is in wisdom, then his senses and all there is of
him are out of matter."
In 1860 Dr. Quimby used, in Portland and vicinity, a circular addressed
"to the sick," some copies of which have been preserved, and from an
original copy of which the following extracts are taken:
"Dr. P. P. Quimby would respectfully announce that he will attend to those
wishing to consult him in regard to their health, and, as his practice is
unlike all other medical practice, it is necessary to say that he gives no
medicine _and makes no outward applications_, but simply sits down by the
patients, tells them their feelings, &c., then his explanation is the
cure; and, if he succeeds in correcting their error, he changes the fluids
of the system and establishes the truth, or health. _The Truth is the
Cure._ This mode of treatment applies to all cases. If no explanation is
given, no charge is made, for no effect is produced.... If patients feel
pain they know it, and, if he describes their pain, he feels it.... After
this it becomes his duty to prove to them the cause of their trouble....
This has been his mode of practice for the last seventeen years. For the
past eight years he has given no medicines, nor made any outward
applications.... There are many who pretend to practice as he does; but
when a person, while in a trance, claims any power from the spirits of the
departed, and recommends any kind of medicine to be taken internally or
applied externally, beware! Believe them not, 'for by their fruits ye
shall know them.'"[5]
In 1887 a short account of Dr. Quimby and his work was published in a
pamphlet entitled _The True History of Mental Science_, by Julius A.
Dresser. Mr. Dresser had been a patient and friend of Dr. Quimby, who had
looked to him to cultivate and extend the Quimby system. But the immediate
accomplishment of that purpose had been prevented.
In 1895 Mrs. Annetta Gertrude Dresser, the wife of Julius A. Dresser, and,
like him, a patient and personal friend of Dr. Quimby, gave to the public
a small but comprehensive volume, _The Philosophy of Dr. P. P. Quimby_.[6]
This excellent sketch of the man and his career contains part of an
article upon him written by his son, Mr. George A. Quimby, for the _New
England Magazine_ of March, 1888, the article being followed, in Mrs.
Dresser's book, by various newspaper notices and criticisms of Dr. Quimby,
running from 1857 to 1863, then by reminiscences of him, an exposition of
his theories, and by selections from his manuscripts.
The newspaper articles were mostly prepared by grateful patients whom Dr.
Quimby had restored from sickness to health.[7] Among these patients were
two daughters of Judge Ashur Ware[8] of Portland, Maine, one of whom, Mrs.
Sarah Ware Mackay, still lives to bless the good Doctor's memory. The Ware
sisters became so deeply interested in Dr. Quimby's thoughts and cures
that they persuaded him to write out his ideas and explain his practise.
As he was exceedingly busy, his articles were rewritten by the two young
ladies or by Mr. George A. Quimby, and were then submitted to the Doctor
for correction. His terminology was peculiar, and sometimes inadequate to
his meaning; but due attention to his writings, with those of his friends,
yields a clear conception of him.
One thing will never be questioned by any honest and sensible person
acquainted with the facts: Dr. Quimby's biographers--his son and his
trusted friends, the Dressers--have told the truth about him. The
information they give fully sustains their general estimate. This estimate
established, we know that Dr. Quimby himself was absolutely sincere, and
could be fully trusted just so far as he understood his own nature and
what he was doing. But this is not to say that he was always right. It is
not even to say that he was without the strongest of prejudices, which may
sometimes have misled him. He was too broad and high a soul to be
_opinionated_ in any narrow, selfish sense; but he would stand for a
conviction till "the crack of doom." "The old gentleman," says one who
knew him familiarly for many years, "would _argue_ a sitting hen off her
nest."
Reference has been made to his ill-health when he began to study
mesmerism. Physicians had told him that his "kidneys were partially
consumed," and that he had "ulcers on his lungs."
"On one occasion [he says], when I had my subject asleep, he told me that
one [of my kidneys] was half consumed, and a piece three inches long had
separated from it, and was only connected by a slender thread. This was
what I believed to be true; for it agreed with what the doctors told me,
and with what I had suffered--for I had not been free from pain for years.
My common sense told me that no medicine would ever cure the trouble, and
therefore I must suffer till death relieved me. But I asked [my subject]
if there was no remedy. He replied, 'Yes--I can put the piece on so it
will grow, and you will get well.'... He placed his hands upon me, and
said he united the pieces so they would grow. The next day he said they
had grown together; and from that day I never experienced the least pain
from them."[9]
Dr. Quimby's personal veracity being accepted by the present writer as
unimpeachable, his word must be taken as perfectly good for this
remarkable story, as he understood the matter. But the various inferences
he drew from his case may be questioned, with no disadvantage to his
character.
"I concluded" [said he], "that [the subject] read my mind; and _his ideas
were so absurd_ that _the disease vanished by the absurdity of the
cure_."
It appears that this mesmeric subject, though he could be forced, under
control, to prescribe anything in the mind of the operator, always did
prescribe, if left to himself, some very simple remedy.
"When I mesmerized my subject," says Dr. Quimby, "he would prescribe some
little simple herb that would do no harm or good of itself. In some cases
this would cure the patient. I also found that any medicine would cure
certain cases if he ordered it. This led me to investigate the matter, and
arrive at the stand that the cure is not in the medicine, but in the
confidence of the doctor or medium."
In his early invalid life, Dr. Quimby had been "filled," he tells us, with
"calomel" and other "strong doses of allopathic poison." As we read his
description of Lucius and the "simple herbs," the thought arises that the
mesmeric subject might have had some power or aid after all, that his good
operator passed over too cavalierly, and that the "herbs" might have
appeared more efficacious, if a reminiscence of vigorous "blue pills," in
which Dr. Quimby once had confidence, had not still dwelt on his tongue.
It is certain that, since his time, some very sensible persons believe
they have been cured of so dire an affliction as cancer by so innocent a
concoction as clover tea.
Dr. Quimby, to use the language of his first biographer, Mr. Dresser,
"progressed gradually out of mesmerism, into a knowledge of the hidden
powers of mind; and he soon found in man a principle, or a power, that was
not of man himself, but was higher than man, and of which he could only be
a medium. Its character was goodness and intelligence; and its power was
great. He also found that disease was nothing but an erroneous belief of
mind.... On this discovery he founded a system of treating the sick, and
founded a science of life.... His discovery was not made from the Bible,
but from natural phenomena and searching investigation.... After the truth
was discovered, he found his new views all portrayed and illustrated in
Christ's teachings and works."
Some of these claims were reaffirmed by Dr. Quimby himself, in a letter
written in 1860.[10]
"You inquire [he says] if I have ever cured any cases of chronic
rheumatism. I answer, Yes; but ... you cannot be saved by pinning your
faith on another's sleeve. Every one must answer for his own sins or
belief. Our beliefs are the cause of our misery, and our happiness or
misery is what follows our belief.... You ask if my practice belongs to
any known science. My answer is, No; it belongs to a Wisdom that is above
man as man.... It was taught eighteen hundred years ago, and has never had
a place in the heart of man since, but is in the world, and the world
knows it not."
In _The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby_, we are told that
"It was Dr. Quimby's chief aim to establish a science of life and
happiness, which all could learn, and which should relieve humanity of
sickness and misery."
But after our various quotations, we can readily perceive, as his
biographer maintains, that "by the word, 'science,'" he always meant "not
what is commonly understood by that word, but something spiritual." By
"science," in short, or what he sometimes called "Wisdom," Dr. Quimby
meant simply the principle of the universe, the presence, truth and power
of God, at the foundation of the human soul.
Dr. Quimby said, and his disciples have said after him, that he "never
went into any trance," and was "a strong disbeliever in _Spiritualism_, as
understood by that name." Pursuing this statement in detail, we find that
his criticism of the subject consisted mostly in his denying the accuracy
of information derived from clairvoyants and spirit-mediums. But, in the
words of one of his most intimate friends, he considered our two states of
physical and spiritual life as "only a difference in dissolving views,"
and he believed that his own thought and senses existed, a part of the
time, out of matter, or in "the scientific world."[11] He even affirmed,
in connection with his view of disease as an impression of mind, that,
transferring himself into the spiritual state of existence, he had cured
his own parents, _after death_, of ailments which had not left them when
they departed from their physical condition. To this strange man, Dr.
Quimby, the world of matter and the world of spirit were so interblended
as to be only two phases of the same thing, _both of which he constantly
experienced_.
"What," he asks, "is this body that we see?" It is "a tenement for man to
occupy _when he pleases_. But, as a man knows not himself, he reasons as
though he were one of the fixtures of his house, or body.... What is the
true definition of death. Death is the name of an idea.... So the
destruction of an idea is death." Man "is dying and living all the time to
error, till he dies the death of all his opinions and beliefs. Therefore
to be free from death is to be alive in truth." In no other way than this,
would Dr. Quimby even recognize such a fact as death. When he came to die
himself, he said "I am perfectly willing for the _change_.... But I know
that I shall be _right here with you, just the same as I have always
been_. I do not dread the change any more than if I were going on a trip
to Philadelphia."
Dr. Quimby, then, in his own way, certainly did believe, accept and avow
what is commonly understood as Spiritualism, but he repudiated its
frequently doubtful accompaniments.
"I know [said he] just how much reliance can be placed on a medium; for
when in the mesmeric state, they are governed by the superstition and
beliefs of the person they are in communication with.... The capacity of
thought-reading is the common extent of mesmerism. Clairvoyance is very
rare.... This state is of very short duration. They then come into that
state where they are governed by surrounding minds. All the mediums of
this day reason about medicine as much as the regular physician. _They
believe in disease and recommend medicine._"
Here we have it, exactly. Dr. Quimby did _not_ believe in disease, except
as "an error of mind," and did _not_ recommend medicine. So, while he
accepted spirit-condition, to the fullest extent, he refused to accept
information from it at second hand. He held that, because a man had
"passed over to the other side," as the Spiritualists say, he was not
necessarily any wiser than he had been in "mind reduced to a state called
matter."
"The invisible world [said he] opens all the avenues of matter, through
which to give the inhabitants communications; but the natural man has
possession of the mediums, so that the scientific man is misrepresented in
nine-tenths of all he says. Now to be in the scientific world is not
necessarily to be wise, but to acknowledge a wisdom above the natural man,
which will enter the world where wisdom sees through matter. This is the
condition of those persons who are thrown into a clairvoyant state. To
them, matter is nothing but an idea, that is seen or not, just as it is
called out. All their senses are in this state, but are under the control
of the natural man.... The explanation of the scientific world is given by
these blind guides ... who cannot understand science."
From this last quotation, we can see precisely how Dr. Quimby at once
accepted and rejected Spiritualism; and we can see, as well, how he
reached the posture of rational idealism. As far as concerned his powers
or gifts, the good man was what would now be called a "mesmerist," a
"clairvoyant," and a "healing medium"--only he was of so sensitive a
spiritual nature that he could exercise these faculties "in his senses,"
or in what, _to him_, was "a perfectly normal state." If, to his own
direct vision and experience, "matter" was "nothing but an idea," to be
"seen or not, just as it is called out," his conclusion could only be that
"all that is seen by the natural man is mind reduced to a state called
matter," and that "there is no matter independent of mind, or life."
But even if granting this posture as a philosophical premise, is it a
logical conclusion to insist, with Dr. Quimby, that disease is merely "a
belief," and that "health is wisdom?"
"I deny disease as a truth," said he, but "admit it as a deception.
Disease is an evil that follows taking an opinion for a truth. Every
disease is an invention of man, and has no identity in wisdom.... Disease
is the misery of our belief, happiness is the health of our wisdom....
False reasoning is sickness and death.... The devil is the error of
mankind.... We are made up of truth and error. Disease is an error, or
belief; the Truth is the cure."
It is necessary to explain, however, that Dr. Quimby found the cause of
human misery "not alone in the conscious mind" and the "opinions and
beliefs about disease," but in the "mental influences and thoughts by
which every person is surrounded," and in the "unconscious or subconscious
mind." He declared that he could tell "an idea or cause" of sickness from
the sensation produced by it, "just as a person knows an orange by the
odor." As he "was able to do this," says Mr. Dresser, "he always told the
patient, at the first sitting, what the latter thought was his disease,
and never allowed the patient to tell him anything about the case."
In a later chapter of our book, the hypothesis that because, in the last
analysis "all things are mind," all disease can be cured by mind _while it
exists in the body_, will be carefully considered. Meanwhile it must be
admitted, without reserve, that under this doctrine, which Dr. Quimby
himself believed with all his might, he practised "healing," for many
years, with marvelous success.
He labored, too, under great difficulties. Fifty years ago, the average
inhabitant of New England was not quite so bigoted and superstitious,
perhaps, as the Jews in the time of Christ, but quite enough so to
suggest a comparison. Dr. Quimby was not orthodox in his theology, and was
still less orthodox in medicine. As Mr. Dresser records the situation,
"[Those] who were then willing to try a practitioner outside of the
medical schools, were persons who had exhausted every means of help within
those schools, and, when finally booked for the grave, would send or go to
Quimby."
In the way of a "grim joke," the Doctor himself said that his patients
"would send for him and the undertaker at the same time, and the one who
got there first would get the case." And the worst of it all was that his
power, when acknowledged, was frequently "imputed to the devil." Still, he
had more work than he could do--so much that it wore him completely out,
and finally ended his life at the age of sixty-four. In his busiest days,
he said:
"I have sat with more than three hundred individuals every year for ten
years, and for the last five years I have averaged five hundred
yearly--people with all sorts of diseases, and every possible state of
mind, brought on by all kinds of ideas in which people believe. Religion
in its various forms embraces many of these causes. Some cases have been
occasioned by the idea that [the patients] had committed the unpardonable
sin. When asked what it was, no two persons ever answered alike."
There is no doubt that Dr. Quimby's patients were generally cured, unless
he told them at once that they were past his or any other mortal aid. "He
saw through them at a glance," as all who knew him agree in testifying. To
deceive him was impossible. For instance: A lady who scouted his special
vision, and was in good health, went to him feigning illness, and for the
purpose of a test. "He received her, as he would any one, and, after a few
moments, without a word having been spoken, took his chair, and, placing
it before her, sat down with his back to her, saying: 'That is the way you
feel toward me. I think you don't need my services, and had better go
home.'" A patient and friend--an eye-witness of unquestionable
veracity--says:
"People were coming to Dr. Quimby from all parts of New England. Many of
these came on crutches, or were assisted into the office; and it was most
interesting to note their progress day by day, or the remarkable change
produced by a single sitting.... I remember one lady who had used crutches
for twenty years, who walked without them after a few weeks."
There is now living in Boston a gentleman who happens to be personally
known to the present writer. The gentleman is a college graduate of high
culture, of large experience, and with the rest, is an author of
distinction. When a young man he had a serious affliction of the eyes,
which gradually increased until he was threatened with blindness. He was a
man of means, and no expense was spared to secure the best medical
treatment. It was unavailing. He heard of Dr. Quimby, and, as the usual
"last resort," applied to him. "He cured me," says the gentleman, "and I
have had no trouble since. But how he did it I don't know. He sat and
talked with me, and sometimes touched my head and face with his hands,
moistened with cold water, though declaring even this to be of no vital
consequence. He cured other people of all sorts of things, as easily as
he cured me. Here I am with two good eyes, and you have the facts."[12]
The ultimate value of "The New Thought," or "Mental and Moral Healing," is
yet a problem; but that P. P. Quimby was the spring and fountain of the
whole stream, with its various branches, is beyond all reputable dispute.
It rests on these grounds:
_First._ He claimed it himself in the presence of all whom he met,
spreading the claim broadcast even in newspaper advertisements and
business circulars.
_Second._ Many of the most intelligent and trustworthy of his patients
became, as we have seen, correspondents of the press to express their
gratitude for his cures, and scores of their articles have been preserved.
With no exception, these articles substantiate Dr. Quimby's declaration
that he alone, of all persons then living, treated disease through the
normal action of the human mind.
_Third._ Dr. Quimby had a son, Mr. George A. Quimby, who acted for years
as his father's secretary. This gentleman is living, and is a well and
widely known citizen of Belfast, Maine. His distinct claim for Dr. Quimby
is that "up to his time, no man, since Jesus, had attempted and succeeded
in curing the sick, without medicine, applications, mesmerism, hypnotism
or spiritualism, simply mentally--through the mind and sense--and who
further claimed that he did it in a scientific manner which could be
taught to others, ... and was in a normal state of mind all the time, as
also was his patient."
_Fourth._ A number of Dr. Quimby's patients and close friends long
survived him, and several of them still live. With a single exception,
every one of these people has said, in substance, exactly what Mr. George
A. Quimby states in detail.
_Fifth._ The single exception is a lady who once said what all the rest
say--and who _is completely on record as saying it_--but who, for reasons
easy to understand and explain, has since taken a lady's high and mighty
privilege of "changing her mind." We will inspect this change.
CHAPTER III.
DR. QUIMBY'S MOST DISTINGUISHED PATIENT.
Dr. Quimby was at the height of his career during the early days of our
Civil War. Among his patients at that time was one who has since become
the most celebrated of them, and who now bears the name of Mary Baker
Glover Eddy. Then, however, the patient was known as Mary M. Patterson--an
incident which occurred through her being a very energetic and pious
woman, who has attracted to herself a considerable variety of
husbands.[13] It was in 1862, says Dr. Quimby's biographer, Mrs. A. G.
Dresser, "that Mrs. Eddy, author of _Science and Health_, was associated
with Dr. Quimby; and I well remember the very day when she was helped up
the steps of his office on the occasion of her first visit. She was cured
by him, and afterward became very much interested in his theory. But she
put her own construction on much of his teaching, and developed a system
of thought which differed radically from it."
Mrs. Mary Baker G. Patterson (since Mrs. Eddy), was greatly surprised at
her cure, and naturally grateful for it. She at once said so in print. It
was in an issue of the Portland Evening _Courier_, of November 7th, 1862.
Her account was this:
"Three weeks ago I quitted my nurse and sick-room _en route_ for Portland.
The belief of my recovery had died out of the hearts of those who were
most anxious for it. With this mental and physical depression, I first
visited P. P. Quimby, and in less than one week from that time I ascended
by a stairway of one-hundred and eighty-two steps to the dome of the City
Hall, and am improving _ad infinitum_.... I have employed
electro-magnetism and animal magnetism, and for a brief period I have felt
relief ... but in no instance did I get rid of a return of all my
ailments, because I had not been helped out of the error in which opinions
involve us. My operator believed in disease independent of mind; hence I
could not be wiser than my teacher. But now I can see, dimly at first, and
only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's
faith and works; and just in proportion to my right perception of truth is
my recovery. This truth, which he opposes to the error of giving
intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if
received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their
normal action, and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That
this is a science capable of demonstration becomes clear to the minds of
those patients who reason upon the process of their cure. The truth which
he establishes in the patient cures him (although he may be wholly
unconscious thereof), and the body, which is full of light, is no longer
in disease."
The communication of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy--then Mrs. Mary M.
Patterson--which she published in the Portland _Courier_, was criticised,
the next day, November 8th, 1862, by the Portland _Advertiser_. In reply
to that paper she said:
"P. P. Quimby stands upon the plain of wisdom with his truth. Christ
healed the sick, but not by jugglery or with drugs. As the former speaks
as never man before spake, and heals as never man healed since Christ, is
he not identified with truth, and is not this the Christ which is in
him?... P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulcher of error, and
health is the resurrection.... But light shineth in darkness, and the
darkness comprehendeth it not."[14]
Dr. Quimby having died on the 16th of January, 1866, Mrs. M. B. G.
Patterson--not to be Mrs. M. B. G. Patterson Eddy until 1867--"sent to
me," says Mr. Julius Dresser in his _True History of Mental Science_, "a
copy of a poem she had written to his memory." With the poem was sent the
following letter:
LYNN, February 15, 1866.
MR. DRESSER:
"_Sir_,--I enclose some lines of mine in memory of our much loved
friend, which perhaps _you_ will not think overwrought in meaning:
_others_ must, of course.
"I am constantly wishing that _you_ would step forward into the place
he has vacated. I believe you would do a vast amount of good, and are
more capable of occupying his place than any other I know of.
"Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk and struck my back on the ice
and was taken up for dead, came to consciousness amid a storm of
vapors from cologne, chloroform, ether, camphor, etc., but to find
myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby.
"The physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should,
but in two days I got out of my bed _alone_, and _will_ walk; but yet
I confess I am frightened, and out of that nervous heat my friends are
forming, spite of me, the terrible spinal affection from which I have
suffered so long and hopelessly.... Now can't _you_ help me? I believe
you can. I write this with this feeling: I think that I could help
another in my condition if they had not placed their intelligence in
matter. This I have not done, and yet I am slowly failing. Won't you
write me if you will undertake for me if I can get to you?...
"Respectfully,
"MARY M. PATTERSON."
The poem by the lady destined to become Mrs. Eddy, author of _Science and
Health_, was published by her, with her name attached, under the caption
of
"LINES on the death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, _who healed with the Truth
that Christ taught, in contradistinction to all Isms_."
"Did sackcloth clothe the sun, and day grow night,
All matter mourn the hour with dewy eyes,
When Truth, receding from our mortal sight,
Had paid to error her last sacrifice?
"Can we forget the power that gave us life?
Shall we forget the wisdom of its way?
Then ask me not amid this mortal strife--
This keenest pang of animated clay--
"To mourn him less: to mourn him more were just,
If to his memory 'twere a tribute given
For every solemn, sacred, earnest trust
Delivered to us ere he rose to heaven--
"Heaven but the happiness of that calm soul,
Growing in stature to the throne of God.
Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,
Seeking, tho' tremblers, where his footsteps trod."
MARY M. PATTERSON.
The complete identity of Mrs. Mary M. Patterson with Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy has been fully established by the highest Christian-Science
authority in the world--Mrs. Eddy herself. In a letter dated March 7th,
1883, addressed to the Boston _Post_, she said:
"In 1862 my name was Patterson, my husband, Dr. Patterson, a distinguished
dentist. After our marriage I was confined to my bed with a severe
illness, and seldom left bed or room for seven years, when I was taken to
Dr. Quimby and partially restored. I returned home, hoping once more to
make that home happy, but only returned to a new agony to find that my
husband had eloped with a married woman from one of the wealthy families
of that city, leaving no trace save his last letter to us, wherein he
wrote: 'I hope some time to be worthy of so good a wife.' I have a bill of
divorce from him...."
In her letter to the Boston _Post_ Mrs. Eddy made some other interesting
assertions. She said:[15]
"We never were a student of Dr. Quimby. Dr. Quimby never had students
to our knowledge. He was somewhat of a remarkable healer, and at the
time we knew him he was known as a mesmerist. We were one of his
patients."
What an astonishing look these statements by Mrs. Eddy in 1883 have, when
compared with the statements of Mrs. Mary M. Patterson from 1862 to 1866.
Let us see.--
_Statement of 1883._
"At the time we knew him [Dr. Quimby], he was known as a mesmerist."
_Statement of 1866._
"Dr. Quimby healed with the truth that Christ taught, in
contradistinction to all Isms."
"Rest should reward him who hath made us whole, _seeking, tho'
tremblers, where his footsteps trod_."
On March 7th, 1883, Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy made, in the Boston Post.
_This Statement._
"We had laid the foundation of mental healing long before we ever saw
Dr. Quimby.... We made our first experiments in mental healing about
1853, when we were convinced that mind had a science which, if
understood, would heal all diseases."
In October, 1862, the same lady, through the Portland _Courier_, made
_This Statement._
"I can see, _dimly at first and as trees walking_, the great principle
which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works; and just in proportion
to my right perception of truth is my recovery. This truth, which he
opposes to _the error of giving intelligence to matter_, changes the
currents of the system. The truth which he establishes in the patient
cures him. This is a science capable of demonstration to those who
reason upon the process."
Then, in the Portland _Advertiser_, came Mrs. Eddy's extraordinary
comparison of Dr. Quimby's words and deeds with those of Christ, and
_This Statement._
"P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulcher of error, and
health is the resurrection."
On the publication of Julius A. Dresser's _True History of Mental
Science_--to which reference has been made in our previous chapter--Mrs.
Eddy was greatly exercised over it. In her _Christian Science Journal_ for
June, 1887, she devoted the leading article, under her own name, to the
Dresser pamphlet.
This little thing was a calm statement of facts, proved as they were
given. From the facts, Dr. Quimby's theory was drawn, and Mr. Dresser
frankly recounted what the general reader would consider Dr. Quimby's
foibles and prejudices, as well as his doctrines and gifts. The pamphlet
contained Mrs. Mary M. Patterson's opinion of Dr. Quimby in 1862, and her
poem of 1866. It agreed with what was then the substance of her own
assertions, by summarizing Dr. Quimby "as the first person of this age who
penetrated the depths of truth so far as to discover and bring forth a
true science of life, and openly apply it to the healing of the sick."
But, in criticising Mr. Dresser's quiet monograph, the amiable "Mother of
Christian Science," proclaimed that Mr. Dresser had "let loose the dogs of
war."; had unleashed a "pet poodle," alternately "to bark and whine" at
her "heels"; and she identified the "pet poodle" with a certain "sucking
litterateur," who had renounced allegiance to her.[16] But when her
preliminary high-tide had ebbed a little, her pen dropped this:
"Did I write those articles in Mr. Dresser's pamphlet, purporting to be
mine? I might have written them, twenty or thirty years ago, for I was
under the mesmeric treatment of Dr. Quimby from 1862 until his death, in
1865. He was illiterate, and knew nothing then of the science of
Mind-healing; and I was as ignorant of mesmerism as Eve before she was
tempted by the serpent."
Those Patterson-Eddy "articles," then--no possible mendacity being
adequate to their extinction--have been grudgingly and angrily admitted by
their author to be genuine. But she would ignore them on the ground of
"mesmerism." Her "head," she says, "was so turned by Animal Magnetism and
will power" under Dr. Quimby's treatment, that she "might have written
something as hopelessly incorrect" as the articles referred to.
But _was_ Mrs. Mary M. Patterson under "mesmeric treatment," or _did_ Mrs.
Mary Patterson Eddy ever really _believe_ she was under such treatment,
when with Dr. Quimby? And was she then a truly "ignorant Eve," without a
fig-leaf of knowledge pertaining to mesmerism? In 1862 she thought _not_,
and we have seen that, in writing her first newspaper letter on Dr.
Quimby, she turned her thought into these words:
"I _have employed electro-magnetism and animal magnetism_, and for a brief
period I have felt relief ... but in no instance did I get rid of a return
of all my ailments, _because I had not been helped out of the error in
which opinions involve us. My operator believed in disease independent of
mind; hence I could not be wiser than my teacher._"
Mrs. Patterson continued her letter by saying what has already been quoted
in full--that Dr. Quimby cured her by "a great principle" of "science,"
through which he established "the truth" in "the patient"--a truth which
he opposed to the error of giving intelligence to matter, and placing pain
where it never placed itself.
In Mrs. Eddy's magazine article of June, 1887, she went so far as to say
of Dr. Quimby,
"His healing was never _considered_ or _called_ anything but Mesmerism."
Well, Mrs. Mary M. Patterson, from 1862 to 1866, both "considered" and
"called" the Doctor's healing something wholly different from mesmerism;
and, saying it was done "by the truth which Christ taught," she considered
and called it something "in contradistinction to _all_ Isms."
Meanwhile, for more than three years of Mrs. Eddy's close acquaintance
with Dr. Quimby, all his advertisements, even, told her, what she then
fluently repeated, that he cured disease by implanting _truth_ in the
human mind, in place of _error_--"the truth being the cure." In other
words, everything around her proclaimed that Dr. Quimby's cures were
performed wholly by Mind-healing.
Mrs. Eddy's reversal of herself has been so agile and exhaustive since
her comparisons of Dr. Quimby with our Lord Jesus Christ, that she has
latterly preferred to speak of the good old doctor, who taught and healed
her, as "unlearned"--a "mesmerist" who cured a patient by "rubbing"
her--an "illiterate" man who said that he was only "John" while she was
"Jesus," and whose "scribblings" she, to a considerable extent, wrote
herself. From all this it must be adduced that Mrs. Eddy, in her Patterson
days, went to Dr. Quimby to be cured of disease, but taught him to do it.
It is true, as we have noted, that Dr. Quimby was not an educated man, in
the sense of the schools. It would have been impossible for him to write
like Mrs. Eddy. When, for instance, she excogitated that first letter of
Mrs. Patterson's to the Portland _Courier_, she opened it in this way:
"When our Shakespeare decided that there were more things in this world
'than were dreamed of in your philosophy,' I cannot say of a verity that
he had a foreknowledge of P. P. Quimby. And when the school Platonic
anatomized the soul and divided it into halves, to be united by elementary
attractions, and heathen philosophers averred that old Chaos in sullen
silence brooded o'er the earth until her inimitable form was hatched from
the egg of night, I would not at present decide whether the fallacy was
found in their premises or conclusions, never having dated my existence
before the flood."
No: P. P. Quimby, even if aided by all the freshmen and sophomores that
ever lived, could never have risen into the state of gorgeous, ponderous
culture evinced in the foregoing power-house and epitome of all learning.
Besides, when that incomparable paragraph was erected, Mrs. Eddy was
young--not yet fifty years of age. At sixty, her literary _style_ had lost
something of its dazzle; but, in _matter_, all her work, especially her
world-renowned book, _Science and Health_, compares beautifully with her
grand production of 1862.
P. P. Quimby was a plain man of great natural genius. When he
wrote--generally in great haste--he paid little attention to capital
letters, punctuation, or _form_ of any kind; but his manuscripts were
carefully revised, under his own direction, by his two faithful friends,
the Ware sisters, or by his son, Mr. George A. Quimby. Mrs. Mary M.
Patterson borrowed and read some occasional jotting--that was all. In the
possession of Mr. George A. Quimby are eight hundred pages of his father's
writings, prepared before Dr. Quimby had the honor of knowing that Mrs.
Patterson (to be Eddy) was on the face of the earth. These writings
contain the substance of all his thoughts.
The knowledge that such writings exist has much disturbed Mrs. Mary Baker
Glover Patterson Eddy. On the 21st of May, 1887, she published, through a
Boston newspaper, an offer to print the Quimby manuscripts, at her own
expense, _provided_ she should "first _be allowed to examine said
manuscripts_," and to see that "they were his own compositions," not
_hers_, which _she_ "had left with him many years ago."
Now Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, author of _Science and Health_, filled with
"immortal mind" and the only "divine science" ever "demonstrated," is of
course an honest woman. Many delightful innocents of all sizes would take
her word for anything she promised. There is not a single member of her
Church-Scientist who is not sure that her little hatchet is infinitely
cleaner and brighter than George Washington's. Still, the possessors of
the Quimby manuscripts, not yet having teetered themselves above all
"earthly wisdom," would rather not trust her with their property.
A few years ago, the eldest of Dr. Quimby's two devoted friends, the Ware
sisters, passed away. With the younger sister she left the following
statement, in the form of an affidavit, which is here printed with
permission:
"I, Emma G. Ware, of Portland, Maine, in the United States of America, do
hereby declare that I knew personally the late Phineas Parkhurst Quimby,
and that I and my sister, Mrs. Mackay (formerly Sarah E. Ware), were his
patients while he resided in Portland, between the years 1859 and 1865,
and that we both owe our restored health to his treatment or mode of
teaching. I have learned that attempts are being made to deprive him of
the credit of being the first to introduce the method of healing through
the mind (or, more correctly, of applying moral philosophy to the cure of
diseases), and I make this declaration out of regard to him, in order that
the credit to which he is entitled may not, without protest, be assumed
by others. I know that while Mr. Quimby resided in Portland he wrote out
his ideas on Mental Science: he was not a scholarly man, and on that
account copies of his writings were made by my sister, myself, and by Mr.
Quimby's son, George A. Quimby. These copies were read over to Mr. Quimby,
and such corrections made as he thought fit. They are now in the
possession of Mr. George A. Quimby, who resides in Belfast, Maine, and my
sister and I have also copies of a number of them. Beyond these, there are
no other copies of his writings, if I except a few fugitive pieces which
he gave away while he resided in Portland. The mode of reasoning pursued
by Mr. Quimby is not new, but its application to disease as a remedy has
not, so far as I am aware, been previously made in modern times. His
teaching may be thus summarized: that all diseases, whether mental or
physical, are caused by an error in reasoning, and that correcting the
error will remove the cause, and restore the sufferer to health."
CHAPTER IV.
A GREAT "METAPHYSICAL" NOVEL.
As shown by our last chapter, Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy, whatever divine
attributes may have perched upon her, has been endowed with some very
human qualities. But in one gift she has been strangely lacking--a good
memory. For, in spite of her association with Dr. P. P. Quimby, his
renovation of her broken system, and all the mellifluous prose and poetry
she devoted to him in his day, the fruitful "mother," "discoverer," and
"founder" of "Christian Science," when she came to set up her new
religion, entirely forgot that her old friend, Quimby, was the real
suggestion of her whole Shekinah. She not only failed to mention the fact,
but she has been so miraculously forgetful, ever since, as to repudiate
her own record of it, and to attempt the obliteration of it from sacred
and profane history.
Mother Eddy's lack of memory, however, has had its plenary compensation.
Her imagination has more than made up for it. The surcharge of this
illimitable faculty has enabled her to produce one of the greatest works
of fiction ever conceived on earth, or possible to any other planet. This
arch-angelic romance, dimly and very distantly founded on fact, bears the
esoteric title of _Retrospection and Introspection_. It is not in the
usual form of a novel, but was evaporated by Mrs. Eddy as her corporal and
spiritual biography, after she had dropped Dr. Quimby from her powers of
research, and had built up her grand theological and financial industry,
"Christian Science." From an attentive reading of this personally
conducted and authorized volume, we know the light in which the hallowed
lady wishes to appear, and we know a good deal more if we read between the
lines.
At eight years of age--if we can only credit true piety hitched up with
lost memory--a heaven-selected little girl, Mary Baker, "repeatedly heard
a voice," calling her "distinctly by name, three times in an ascending
scale." At first she thought it was a human voice; but in due season--for
the call came many times--she, her mother and her cousin, Mehitable
Huntoon, learned better. Then her mother read to her the Hebrew story of
little Samuel, and advised her to respond to the voice, saying, "Speak,
Lord, for thy servant heareth." Finally the chosen virgin took this
advice, whereupon the voice "came no more" to her "_material_ senses." Its
mission had been fulfilled.
Such is the opening legend told to the marines of the Church Scientist, in
that juicy book, _Retrospection and Introspection_.[17]
Still, in these days of "Spiritual manifestations," the numerous believers
in messages from "the summer land" would account, in a quite simple way,
for the voices calling little Hebrew Samuel and little New-England Mary.
But not so Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. "Am I a believer in Spiritualism?" she
asks. "I believe in no ism.... As I understand it Spiritualism is the
antipode of Christian Science."[18]
Ah, it was no voice of common, finite spirit, that came to the high and
mighty founder of an "absolutely scientific religion." So there is but
one conclusion she gives us to draw: _the voice was directly the voice of
God_. The Infinite and Omniscient, the All-in-All, spake to the girl of
nine years, as a miraculous call to her divine work. At that time, she
tells us, her father thought her "brain" was "too large for her body."[19]
The old gentleman was doubtless right. It looks, too, as if the brain of
his blessed daughter, with the entire head containing it, has been rapidly
enlarging ever since.
From the metaphysical adventures of Saint Mary Baker, as told in her
_Retrospection and Introspection_,[20] we find that when twelve years old
she was admitted to the "Orthodox Church" of New England, though she
declined to accept the doctrine of predestination--a doctrine which so
troubled her that a doctor was called, who pronounced her "stricken with
fever." It is told of Martin Luther that when a theological student once
came to him half-crazy over the same doctrine, the doughty reformer
ordered him to go and get "well drunk." In the case of Robert Ingersoll,
his soul could only find relief from the tenet by such hard swearing that
it brought him peace. But we are assured by our divine lady of the "Church
Scientist" that she took the better as well as the usual course prescribed
for such trials. She "wrestled in prayer." For she felt sure that the
Creator of the Universe, who had once descended in person and spoken to
her by name, could not fail to possess the faculty of hearing and the
usefulness of help. Behold it was so! Instantly the fever was gone and
health was restored. "The physician marveled," she says, and John Calvin
"lost his power."
In 1878 Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy was called to preach at the Baptist
Tabernacle of Boston. The congregation increased beyond the capacity of
the pews, and it was no uncommon occurrence for the sick to be healed by
her sermons. Cancers were cured, and "many pale cripples went into the
church, leaning on crutches, who went out carrying them on their
shoulders." Mrs. Eddy says so.[21]
By the same authority--in her _Retrospection and Introspection_--it is
stated that her "Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing," otherwise
"Christian Science," was "discovered" by her in 1866. The day and date are
not given. But it was some time after February 15th; for at that time one
Mary M. Patterson was occupied in putting on poetic mourning for Dr. P. P.
Quimby, and in begging Mr. Julius A. Dresser to visit Lynn and heal an
injury to her back from a fall on the ice.
It is not well to wear mourning too long. In the spring of 1866 it must
have occurred to Mrs. Eddy that weeds of poetry would not pay, and she
hustled them off. Dr. Quimby having gone "to heaven" and slipped out of a
decayed memory, his obituary poetess just then realized that she had spent
"twenty years" in tracing "physical effects to a mental cause." Then came
the "scientific certainty" that "all causation" is "Mind," and that "every
effect is a mental phenomenon."[22]
What "Christian Scientists" mean by "scientific certainty" is proof by
"healing." Take the revered principle of cosmogony that "the moon is made
of green cheese." If one who holds the doctrine, "heals" anybody, the
proposition is "demonstrated." Mrs. Eddy's "scientific works" are all
filled with this unanswerable logic. "Mortal Mind"--a thing which she
utterly reprobates--may find difficulty in accepting the conclusion; but
it is doubtless quite as well founded as most of the "healing" itself.
Mrs. Eddy's own case is an illustration in point. A bed-ridden invalid for
years, she was snatched from death, she has told us, by Dr. Quimby, and
within a week of his first mental treatment she climbed to the top of a
city hall. The writer has read a series of Mrs. Eddy's unpublished
letters, which show that for some time she had varied nervous and spinal
relapses. When not with Dr. Quimby, she wrote to him for "absent
treatments," and sometimes _saw him appear to her_--or said she did--in
response. Finally she was cured. Then she fell on an icy sidewalk, was
nearly frightened to death, and wrote her letter beseeching Mr. Dresser to
"undertake" for her. But, having been taught mind-healing by Dr. Quimby,
she "demonstrated" over herself, and got up. The Doctor's original cure
appears to have been so effective that her fall on the ice was mostly a
jar of her imagination and a contusion on her veracity. For, in her
_Retrospection and Introspection_, she solemnly affirms that her accident
caused an injury far beyond the reach of "medicine" or "surgery," which
she repaired by application of the Divine Spirit. This experience, says
Mrs. Eddy ("scientist"), was a "falling apple of discovery" to her.
Thereupon she went out into the wilderness of Boston--"withdrew," that is,
from society--for three years--that she might search the Scriptures and
find "Science."[23] At the end of her retirement, she had learned that
"Mind reconstructs the body," and that "nothing else can." How it is done,
she adds, "the Spiritual Science of Mind must reveal." Her charge for a
course of ten lessons in this "divine science" was soon fixed at "only
three hundred dollars."[24]
Of the genuine original "Christian Science"--the sole and undivided
"discovery" of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy--she says:
"I named it _Christian_ because it is compassionate, helpful, and
spiritual. God I called _Immortal Mind_. That which sins, suffers, and
dies, I named _mortal mind_. The physical senses, or sensuous nature, I
called _error_ and _shadow_. Soul I denominated _Substance_, because Soul
alone is truly substantial. God I characterized as individual entity, but
his corporeality I denied. The Real I claimed as eternal; and its
antipodes, or the temporal, I described as unreal. Spirit I called the
_reality_; and matter, the _unreality_."[25]
On the hash and rehash of theology, here announced, we need not dwell just
now, but will consider, for the moment, how much of Mrs. Eddy's
individually discovered and copyrighted creed was first expounded, though
_not_ copyrighted, by one P. P. Quimby.
Dr. Quimby never thought of pushing his thought and work under the special
name of "Christian Science," though his writings show that he used the
term.[26]
He was not in pursuit of money by truckling to current preconception or
prejudice. We recollect, however--for our own memory has not been laid in
the tomb of our piety--that after "his truth was discovered" he "found his
new views all portrayed and illustrated in Christ's teachings." We
recollect that he said of his practise, "It belongs to a Wisdom that is
above man as man. It was taught eighteen hundred years ago, and has never
had a place in the heart of man since." He said, "There is a bread which,
if a man eat, he is filled; and this bread is Christ or Science." In 1865
the Portland _Advertiser_ said of Dr. Quimby:
"By a method entirely novel and at first sight quite unintelligible, he
has been slowly developing what he calls _the 'Science of Health'_; that
is, as he defines it, a science founded on principles that can be taught
and practised like that of mathematics, and not on opinion or experiments
of any kind whatsoever."
Prior to the issue of Mrs. Eddy's _Retrospection and Introspection_ she
had, of course, written her other great and better-known work of
religious fiction, called _Science and Health_. Now the title of that
book--the term "Science and Health"--is quite different from Dr. Quimby's
term, "The Science of Health." Still, the chief distinction between them,
considering what Dr. Quimby taught, is that the latter came first and the
former afterwards.
It does not appear that God--who in our day has been personally known by
Mrs. Eddy only--and in an interview which _He_ took the trouble to
seek--was ever technically defined by Dr. Quimby as "Immortal Mind," or
"characterized as individual entity," with "corporeality denied." It may
have been so; for all the obligations derived by Mrs. Eddy from Dr. Quimby
have not yet been published. By all competent theologians and
metaphysicians, since the beginning at least of human records, God has
been conceived and proclaimed as Infinite Spirit, one with "Immortal
Mind," and above "corporeality," which has been accounted a temporary
phase of finite things. Plato was pretty nearly made of this conception in
philosophy, and St. John in religion. P. P. Quimby was neither a Plato nor
a Saint John; but he "agreed" with them, in his literal, honest fashion,
as he said he did with Bishop Berkeley.
If Mrs. Eddy had ever read a history of philosophy before she instituted a
religion, she would have found that Spinoza honored her advent, some two
hundred years in advance of it, by postulating "Substance" as the "Soul"
of things. Incidentally, too, he postulated "matter" as an "unreality of
sense," and thus, in a way, as "error" and "shadow"--the product of
"mortal mind." Dr. Quimby said, with the utmost possible distinctness, "I
believe matter to be nothing but an idea belonging to the senses"; and it
will be found, when his writings get published, that he said the same
thing in some hundreds of different ways. But all this was known to the
thought of India, even before books were written, and the original
authorities for it had then been lost.
But now: in one point of doctrine--and to her the most important
one--Mother Mary Baker G. Eddy does stand completely "original," solitary
and alone. She holds of "matter" that it is not only not what it seems,
but is _nothing at all_ save "unreality." To recognize it as anything
whatever, beyond "shadow" and "error," is to be buried in disease, sin,
and death. Absolutely to deny the most palpable fact of daily existence is
to Christian Science the one road to health and salvation.
To Dr. Quimby, matter was a state of things "reduced from mind," but the
state and the things were _here_. They were perfectly _actual_ as _a
condition_, though not as an unrelated fixture of all time and eternity.
Every "idealist," in every age, has taken this view, excepting only Mrs.
Eddy. Of her own view, no human being out of a refuge for imbeciles or the
Church Scientist, could possibly begrudge her the sole copyright. In due
order Mrs. Eddy's theological speculation will be further considered.
From the Arabian Nights tales of _Retrospection and Introspection_, we
learn that, before setting up her new church, the revelator "wandered
through the dim mazes of _Materia Medica_." She "found," in Jahr's two
hundred and sixty-two remedies, the one pervading secret that the less
matter and the more mind, the better the work. Homeopathy taught her that
in the higher attenuations of its drugs, "matter is rarefied to its fatal
essence, mortal mind." Her conclusion was that "mortal belief," instead of
any "drug," governs the action of material medicine. "I claim," says she,
"for healing scientifically," that "it does away with all material
medicine, and recognizes the antidote for all sickness, as well as sin, in
the Immortal Mind; and mortal mind as the source of all ills which befall
mortals.... The mortal body being but the objective state of the mortal
mind, this mind must be renovated to improve the body."[27]
Considering the high moral perch on which Mrs. Eddy has set herself, and
contemplating the cerulean nest in which she has laid the eggs of
"science," it is really painful here to study her case of fatty
degeneration of the memory. For, apart from mere phraseology and
acquaintance with Jahr, Dr. P. P. Quimby had reached the principle and
practise of "healing scientifically," more than twenty years before she
proclaimed it in _Science and Health_, and he had applied it to Mrs. Eddy
herself, thirteen years prior to that publication, which descended from
heaven in 1875. He did not mention "mortal mind"--by name, that is--for he
called the fact of it "opinion of the natural man," in "the state of
matter," and so far of "error." He did not use the term, "Immortal Mind";
for he designated it as "Wisdom," "Science," and the "Christ," as
distinguished from "the man, Jesus." Adopting the Christ _principle_, Dr.
Quimby aimed to follow, persistently but humbly, in the footsteps of
Jesus. Dr. Quimby, in fact, was covering, both theoretically and
practically, the whole true and essential field of "Christian Science,"
while avoiding its nonsense and its humbugs, at a time when Mrs. Eddy, as
"Mary B. Glover," was a writer of love stories for "Peterson's
Magazine."[28]
CHAPTER V.
A SOFT SET OF CRITICS.
We have now learned a little of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy's celestial and
terrestrial biography, as derived from the supramundane novel,
_Retrospection and Introspection_, and some other sources. Bare allusion
has been made to her _Science and Health_. But this, she says, "is my most
important work, containing the complete statement of Christian Science."
The book, as we have seen, came among men--or, more strictly speaking,
among less busy women--in 1875; and a thousand copies, we are told,
comprised the first edition. "The critics," Mrs. Eddy informs us,
pronounced it "wholly original," but a thing that would "never be read."
The foolish "critics"! How little they knew about "originality"! But they
knew still less of Mrs. Eddy's "Spiritual _afflatus_," as she designates
it, in the fervency of which "erudite systems of philosophy" had "melted";
nor did they realize her "divinely appointed mission"; for, in 1891,
_Science and Health_ had reached sixty-two editions. "Then the critics
said" that "Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or certain
German philosophers," had originated Mrs. Eddy's sole and well-monopolized
"Science."[29]
Now if any "critics" ever did really shoot such soft intellectual putty as
that, they ought certainly to have been condemned to the most heroic sort
of mind-healing.
Think of George Berkeley, the most acute, the most logical mind of his
age, standing with both feet on John Locke's "Essay of the Human
Understanding," and attempting to pull himself up into the Infinite by
mouthing the shibboleth that there is no finite!
And David Hume--the bonny skeptic, David--whose keenness brought the
philosophy of his age to a logical standstill, and for the moment broke up
all "metaphysics"! Poor David Hume! In the hands of what a "critic" it
was, who imagined he had ever furnished a speck of meat for such a haggis
as _Science and Health_!
For the moment, let us pass by Mr. Emerson, the Puritan mystic of New
England transcendentalism, who beamed serenely down on mere "critics," and
told them he hoped he "had never said anything that needed to be proved."
But Mrs. Eddy's phrase, "_certain German philosophers_," is one that can
only refer to Immanuel Kant, with his school of followers, who summed up
the pure thinking of the modern world, as Plato and Aristotle summed up
the pure thinking of the ancient world.
History tells us that Kant was a man who discovered the planet Uranus by
mathematics before Herschel found it with a telescope, and who "had
mastered all sciences" to date when he lived. Ripe with the knowledge of
sixty years, he wrote his _Critique of Pure Reason_. This, the most
profound and far-reaching treatise of any age, should have been named "The
Analysis of Mind and Matter, Time and Space"; for such was really Kant's
subject and achievement.
This extraordinary little German professor, Immanuel Kant, was the most
regular and temperate of human beings; but he had a touch of asthma, for
which, before all the medicinal properties of mind-cure were known, he
took daily about a thimble-full of rum. Kant has been frightfully dealt
with by his "critics," the most of whose heads he completely pulverized in
connection with their activity in his behalf. But suppose Herr Professor
Kant could have imagined that any "critic" on earth would ever accuse him
of instigating the philosophy of Mary Baker G. Eddy! In that dread event,
"the sage of Königsberg," who once lost the thread of a lecture when a
button he used to finger was cut from his coat, might have been so
disconcerted, so sunk in amazement and despair, as to swallow his whole
bottle of liquor, instead of the twentieth of a gill, and to burn his
_Critique of Pure Reason_ in a fit of _delirium tremens_.
It is well he was tempted into no such catastrophe; for, on getting on a
bit, we shall find that every possible system of "metaphysics," to have
any scientific foundation in modern thought, must refer itself to Kant's
dissection of the universe.
CHAPTER VI.
"THE PRECIOUS VOLUME."
In the world of books, Mrs. Eddy's _Science and Health_ is the specially
"precious volume"; for she herself so designates and describes it at the
head of a chapter in her _Retrospection and Introspection_.[30] To her,
indeed, it is a very precious volume--more precious than even a goodly
pile of "the precious metals." Her devotees exchange these for it with
sublime certainty that they get more than the worth of their money; and
being in great need of science, to say nothing of health, their
profuseness may be forgiven.
But it should be said at once that "Christian Scientists" are neither a
bad nor a specially crude sort of the world's queer inhabitants. They are
fanatically honest; and, as a whole, they have just that "little
knowledge" which has long been proverbial as "a dangerous thing." Then
they are quite incapable of looking through the veil worn by their
beatific "Mother."
In the eyes of the unregenerate, these children of hers frequently turn to
_Science and Health_, or to a picture of its author celestially touched
up, when it would be well to inspect their plumbing and wash their
windows. But this is no broad case against them; for almost any sort of
camp-meeting, without regard to sect, is apt to bring upon the wicked some
small inconveniences.
As can readily be seen, Mrs. Eddy's lambs are often amusing, and thus
brighten life for less spiritual beings.
There is my babe-eyed friend, Mr. Tott. He never committed a cent's worth
of sin in his life. He is a veritable piece of the salt of the earth, a
little over-salted. But his youth has departed, and his sight is failing.
He used to wear glasses; but he discarded them for "Christian Science" and
a dim, economic light. He sees a little yet, though chiefly with "the eye
of the mind." With this eye, however, he beholds marvels of "healing"
going on all around him, which he proclaims and verifies at the weekly
meetings of his church. He buys all Mrs. Eddy's books and publications,
as fast as they come out. By patient effort he deciphers something of
their contents. Then, as he contemplates an assertive text from _Science
and Health_, or some tale of Jonah interpreted by Mother Eddy's _Key to
the Scriptures_, a celestial calm descends on his soul, and folds it in a
fabric softer than silk. He knows that he is better in health than ever
before, that he sees better, and that the entire universe is becoming
unspeakably illuminated. Disease never touches his physical frame; he has
merely "a _belief_ of a cold," or "a _belief_ of a corn." In the
etherialized Mr. Tott only one thing ever suggests a remnant of "wicked
matter." Cast a doubt on the sainthood of Mrs. Eddy, then you behold an
angel in anger. He may not indulge in personal violence, but he swiftly
threatens that, if once you breathe your unholy doubt aloud, "Judge
Hanna," or some other Sampson of "Science," will reduce you to a
grease-spot.[31]
But, among all Mrs. Eddy's followers, her "precious volume," _Science and
Health_, is paramountly precious to those who have paid their three
hundred dollars for imbibing the inmost knowledge of her "unfathomable"
religion, and have gone forth among the gentiles to teach and to heal. To
a missionary "in science," the "precious volume" cannot be too preciously
bound. Let the daintiest white of the white-winged dove encase its
"inspired words," printed on translated tissue of ethereal linen. Let the
sheen of the gold standard furnish splendor for the edges of the leaves,
and letters for the cover. Let the book be held before the eyes of a new
student or patient, with abysmal solemnity and mystic silence. Hypnotism,
if you _name_ it such, is bitterly disallowed; but "the precious volume"
is so hallowed a thing that no danger can come from using it in the same
way as the disk of a mesmerist. Impressiveness is the point--that self may
depart, and "science" become boundless. Almost every religious sect in all
history has had its fetich. "Christian Science" is not behind the
procession. Mrs. Eddy's _Science and Health_ is the fetich thereof. In a
plain garment, for the poorer saints, it may be had for three dollars and
eighteen cents. In the purest, holiest, most golden robe it costs six
dollars.[32]
Let us look into _Science and Health_ and see what it is; though the
author warns us that something more than "mortal mind" is required to
understand it. This she asserts and repeats with the voice, as it were, of
a fog-horn grown eternal, until a multitude of people have come to think
that the sound really contains significance. In her _Retrospection and
Introspection_ Our Lady of "The Precious Volume" says:[33]
"_Science and Health_ is the textbook of Christian Science.... When the
demand for this book increased, and people were healed by simply reading
it, the copyright was infringed. I entered a suit at law, and my copyright
was protected."
The case of "protected copyright" to which Mrs. Eddy refers, took place in
1883. A Mr. Arens had practised some sort of "mental healing," without the
consent of the papal mother of "Christian Science." In connection with
such healing he had issued some pamphlets, in which, according to the
court records, he certainly came very near to reproducing certain
sentences from _Science and Health_, which had a commercial value in his
line, though they would not have sold for a cent out of "Science." The
man's defense was that Mrs. Eddy's own works were not original with her,
but had been copied from writings by Dr. Quimby.
Now Dr. Quimby, as we have seen, had sown the seed of the whole modern
field of "mental healing," and Mrs. Eddy, as Mary M. Patterson, had told
the whole truth about it. But Quimby's simple doctrine was that matter is
a phase of mind; and hence that the mind of man, as an inlet of God's
truth and power, can change the body and cure disease. Appropriating this
thought, Mrs. Eddy had stretched it out and blown it up into the ponderous
misfit labeled "Christian Science."
In 1883 none of Dr. Quimby's writings had been published, and there was no
convenient evidence to prove that Mrs. Eddy had ascribed his mind-healing
to "the Christ that was in him," and to his establishment of "Truth" in
wrong-thinking sick patients. As no such facts were presented, and as Mr.
Arens had clearly plagiarized Mrs. Eddy, whatever _she_ had done, the
court properly decided that her "copyright" be "protected." In other
words, the merits of the case were not involved, though the decision has
given Mother Eddy a chance to say, with her usual candor and logic, that
the failure of Arens "to produce his proof is _conclusive evidence_ that
_no such proof existed_."
_Science and Health_ is a book of nearly seven hundred pages, containing
somewhat less than two hundred thousand words; but this brief of
Un-Christian Non-Science includes Mrs. Eddy's _Key to the Scriptures_.
The eighty-second edition of "the precious volume" is the particular issue
here elucidated. We shall make a few quotations from _Science and Health_,
but only just enough to verify our criticism of it as a pretentious,
untrue, and unhealthy book, which, in the interest of the public, needs to
be exploded. For these quotations we shall give Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy
full credit. It would be a crime, indeed, to accuse any one else of
originating such capsules of metaphysical ipecac.
As laid down in _Science and Health_, the fundamental propositions of the
mumbo-jumbo termed "Christian Science" are four in number.
_First_: God is All.
_Second_: God is Good. Good is Mind.
_Third_: God, Spirit, being All, nothing is matter.
_Fourth_: Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease.
Disease, sin, evil, death, deny Good, omnipotent God, life.
Mrs. Eddy says that, _to her_, these are "_self-evident_ propositions."
They are proved, too, by "the rule of inversion." They are just as
harmonious backward as forward. There is a little hitch in Number Four,
which declares one way that God denies death, evil, sin, and disease, and
the other way that these deny God. But this one exception to "the rule of
inversion" only confirms it; for, according to Scripture, God is true, and
"every [mortal] man a liar."
For the corner-stone, then, of Eddyism, we have self-evident
propositions--self-evident to the mind of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy--and
with these an appeal to Scripture. Truly enough this must be "Divine
Science"; for no rational creature of modern times can suspect it of being
human science, whether true or false. But, says the great teacher of it,
"no human pen or tongue taught me the science," and "neither tongue nor
pen can overthrow it." Well, never mind the overthrow. But, when Mrs. Eddy
tells us that "no human pen or tongue" taught her "the science of
mind-healing," we are obliged to infer that Dr. Quimby was more than
human. How greatly would the plain but gifted Quimby have been shocked,
had he foreknown that Mrs. Eddy would thus apotheosize him.
Through _Science and Health_ we learn that "Christian Science" reveals,
"incontrovertibly," that "Mind is All-in-all"--the only "realities" being
"the divine Mind and idea." We learn, further, that this divine Mind is
God, that God's idea is Man, and that by authority of Webster an "idea" is
"an image in mind."
It would be truly pitiable for any theologian, or indeed for any believer
in a spirit-principle of the cosmos, to attempt the "overthrow" of these
venerable "revelations" now protected by Mrs. Eddy's copyright, but which
were hoary with age even in the days of the Greek Academy. Barring
Webster's definition of an idea, these "revelations" to Mrs. Eddy appear
revealed in the Bible, though not copyrighted. As logical metaphysics, in
recent times, Hegel reduced them to their utmost sublimation; and Hegel is
excellent authority in many of our colleges, as well as with the good Dr.
Harris, our United States Commissioner of Education at Washington.
Let us say once more that there is no trouble in effecting a spiritual
derivation of the universe, except to our friends, "the materialists," who
have themselves refined "matter" to things not much like it. The only
trouble with an all-containing, all-pervading Spiritual Source of
Existence, is in the funny havoc sometimes made of it by half-baked
people, like "Christian Scientists."
To Dr. Quimby, "Mind," or "Spirit" was the principle of all things. To
him, Matter was a condition of Spirit--"an idea," he said, "reduced to a
solid"--a "solid" meaning a definite and real appearance to human sense.
But this conception, which the old and regular school of metaphysicians
have held for thousands of years, would not do for the genuine original
"Mother of Christian Science" when she came to prescribe a dogma for the
cure of all possible disease from leprosy to bunions. It was necessary,
she thought, to have a stronger pill. She compounded it in the form that
"matter," including the "mortal body," is not only "the objective state of
the mortal mind," but that mortal mind is unmixed, "error," entailing all
sin, disease, and death. Yet "error" is really "nothing"; or say something
only to be _denied_. The duty of life, "_in Science_," is to make this
denial effective. Matter, sin, disease, are absolute illusions and
delusions of "mortal mind," which itself is just "error," to be wiped out.
Now say so, and they are all gone. Or if they persist in seeming to be
anywhere, be more firm with them. Sing the denial, as well as say it. Keep
it up. Let nothing else intervene for a second. Let every paragraph you
write be made of it. Give it ten thousand different forms, and each form
ten thousand variations. If you fully concentrate your whole mind on this
"divine" business, and pay the full price for learning it, you will
elevate yourself into "perfect harmony" with "Immortal Mind." When you
accomplish this undertaking, impurity and evil, sin, disease and death,
will disappear as the shadow of their original nothingness, which they
always are and ever were.
Here is the whole real substance of "the precious volume," _Science and
Health_, including Mrs. Eddy's marvelous _Key to the Scriptures_. Still,
the holy tome has some interesting particulars.
On opening it, and journeying only as far as page 2, one finds that, while
"Christian Science" is copyrighted property, "the Divine Spirit" was the
real author of it; for Mrs. Eddy explicitly declares that through
"Christian Science" the Divine Spirit testified to her, and that the
testimony unfolded her one basic, forever-echoed assumption that "matter"
has nothing in it but "falsity."
Next comes up the Platonic conception--which, unfortunately for Plato, he
neglected to copyright--that the Principle of Mind, with its reflection
or "idea," constitutes the real universe. Mrs. Eddy pronounces this
philosophical conception a scientific fact; but it was not "proved to the
senses"--which, by the way, _never perceive anything but "error"_--until
"Christian Science revealed it." Then it was proved "incontrovertibly,
absolutely and divinely," by repairing Mrs. Eddy's back after a fall on
ice.
From time immemorial, the history of philosophy has been familiar with the
thought that the human body is a reflex and product of mind; a practical
reality for all earthly conditions and purposes, but resolvable, from the
view of spirit, into simply an objective appearance. The thought, too, has
been frequent in poetry. Three hundred years ago Spenser sang:
"So every spirit, as it is more pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
_For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make._
Yet Mrs. Eddy claims this doctrine, too, as her "discovery," though, with
her, it is not merely "mind," but the "mortal" or "misnamed" article,
that produces the body. All such "mind" is unalloyed "error," and the
body, or apparition of this error, is another error. It was this
"discovery," she says, that led to her infallible proposition, the
all-inclusiveness of Immortal Mind and the all-nothingness of matter,
which she made the bed-rock of her all-healing "Science."
Matter being Nothing, and our bodies being nothing but error, there is
great use, notwithstanding, for the one genuine medicine, "Christian
Science." "Physical healing," with "mental healing" thrown in, is the
large wholesale business of which Mother Eddy is proprietor and director.
In the last analysis, according to the preface of _Science and Health_,
this medicine is "Divine Principle." Such a remedy naturally dispels the
unfounded belief of matter, the unfounded imaginings of sickness and sin,
which drop out of supposed reality, and so out of existence.
As the term "Christian Science" is necessarily suggestive of Christian
history, even Mrs. Eddy has not quite claimed the whole product of
Christianity as originating in _Science and Health_. She does admit, with
pious candor, that God imparted the _spirit_ of Christian Science to Jesus
and the Apostles. But the _letter_ is another thing. "The absolute letter"
waited for Mary Baker G. Eddy; and, were the blessed lady a living
kaleidoscope, she could hardly add to the combinations and varieties in
which she presents this claim to her readers.
Eddyism proclaims One God, all-inclusive, whose highest title is "Immortal
Mind." But, "in Science," this God, being all-inclusive, as Unity,
Identity, and Goodness--so otherwise all-_ex_clusive--there is no room
anywhere for a Devil, or say, rather, the _recognition_ of one. If God is
not only all, but all-good, no opposite to this principle can exist.
However, there is "mortal mind," or "sense," with its image and creation,
"matter," and in these are sin and disease. Still, mortal mind, matter,
sin, disease, have no relation or reference to God. _He_ "fills all
Space."[34] _They_ subsist neither by His creation nor permission. Hence
they _can not be_--they are just _naught_.
But hold! Christian Science, with _Science and Health_, being present
avatars to dispel sin and cure disease, such a science and such a book
necessarily admit sickness and sin, both implicitly and explicitly. Now
what is to be done in such a dilemma? Why, mortal mind, matter, evil, and
all afflictions, while "nothing," are a kind of nothing that may be
mentioned as "error" and ultimate "self-nullity." Thus, while Eddy
Science, alias "Christian Science," has no real Devil, it has a very
practical _seeming_ Devil, and whips him from stump to stump with logic
worse than himself. Finally, as he is not "substance," but "shadow," you
knock him out by calling him names.
But the doctrine of the Trinity, as "demonstrated in Science," is the best
abstract of the Eddy theology. This Trinity consists of one self-identical
"Father-and-Mother God"; Man, "the Idea" or "Reflection"; then Christian
Science, "the Holy Comforter."
The position of man, as theologized by Mrs. Eddy, is, if anything, more
terribly mixed than that of the Devil. Man is "the image of God"; but, as
God is _All_, man has "no real individuality." He cannot have personality
of his own, as God has no "separability." Still this "God's idea," named
man, somehow takes on an imaginary state, named "mortal mind," and this
imaginary state has a dream of error and misery named "Sense." Human
individuality, mortal mind, and sense, are all, in reality, null and void.
Man, however, being God's idea and reflection, can never lose his
unpossessed "true self." The divine contradictions of _Science and Health_
are here insurmountable. Let no man try to rationalize them. Mrs. Eddy
well remarks in her _Retrospection and Introspection_, that "Divine
Science demands mighty wrestlings with mortal beliefs, as we sail into the
eternal haven over the unfathomable sea of possibilities."
O Lord, how long!
Oh, bosh, how strong!
The fact is that any long-continued reading of _Science and Health_, with
the innocence to imagine it either true, difficult or profound, is enough
to turn a weak mind idiotic. To a trained thinker, the only danger from
the book is an attack of nausea or a hemorrhage from laughing.
CHAPTER VII.
"KEY" TO THE EDDY SCRIPTURE, SCIENCE AND HEALTH.
Mrs. Eddy's Un-Christian Non-Science may be summarized as a caricature of
her early "New England Orthodoxy," crazily combined with New England
Transcendentalism, coated with a kind of free-thought permissible only to
her own "divine Science," all overlying Dr. Quimby's "Science of Health,"
and carefully put under copyright.
Let us now see a few moonstone gems from her "precious volume"--just
enough to illustrate our criticism of it and not infringe on her
monopolized territory.
It may be explained, by the way, that the United States statute governing
copyright precludes the reproduction and sale of books and pamphlets, _as
wholes_, without permission of the authors; and protects even _parts_ of
dramas, pictures, and other "works of art"--the intent being, of course,
to protect, also, one of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not steal."
But, if an untrue and injurious book could not be analyzed, and a dozen
extracts taken from it in proof of criticism, no literary quack could be
exposed, in protection of the truth and the public. In that case, the
Copyright Law would be worse than the old "Fugitive Slave Bill," and it
would be a sacred duty to get into jail, if necessary, for violating it.
Fortunately there is no such need. The law was not drawn in the interest
of charlatans and malefactors, and has never been interpreted against the
decencies of justice.
Following "Mother" Eddy's example in connection with our quotations from
her _Science and Health_, we shall interpret them in a strictly
"scientific" light, as she, with miraculous nerve, in her _Key to the
Scriptures_, has done with other sacred writings. Thus we shall illumine
_Science and Health_ in the same way that she has illumined _Genesis_ and
_The Apocalypse_.
_Science and Health_, 7.[35]--"In the year 1866 I discovered the Science
of Metaphysical Healing, and named it Christian Science. God had been
graciously fitting me, during many years, for the reception of a final
revelation of the absolute Principle of Scientific Mind-healing."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--History reveals to us, for sure, that
"Mother Eddy," has always _claimed_ to have discovered and founded the
only genuine and original Christian Science. Though she was once a patient
of Dr. P. P. Quimby, and at that time one Mary M. Patterson said that
Quimby cured disease by mental truth--"the truth that Christ taught"--this
miserable episode has nothing to do with the case. Mrs. Eddy has told us
that the Patterson woman was a creature "ignorant" of "Science," whom Dr.
Quimby used to "mesmerize." He cured her of a seven-years' complaint in
the mortal body, but so addled her head that she had no knowledge of what
she talked about. Thus, Mrs. Patterson's impression that Dr. Quimby was
the modern founder of mind-healing has no weight. The truth was not in
her. But Mother Eddy, notwithstanding she herself was once that same Mrs.
Patterson, discovered all truth and all science, without regard to any of
her previous statements.
_Science and Health_, 453.--"A Christian Scientist needs my work on
Science and Health for his textbook, and so do all his students and
patients.... It is the voice of Truth to this age, and contains the whole
of Christian Science, or the Science of healing through Mind.... It was
the first published book containing a statement of Christian Science....
It registered this revealed Truth, uncontaminated with human hypotheses.
Other works, which have borrowed from this book without giving it credit,
have adulterated the Science."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--It is evident that everybody "in Science"
should buy its real Bible, _Science and Health_; for the Old and the New
Testament, while it is policy to use them in the Church Scientist, are in
dreadful need of exegesis by Mary Baker G. Eddy. She is the one religious
person, altogether scientific, that now exists in the world. She is
"uncontaminated truth," and anything that interferes with her abets
larceny and spreads leprosy. Moreover, it is a financial crime against
her, conducive to heart-disease. Let it again be stated that "the precious
volume," _Science and Health_, is cheap for cash, ranging from only $3.18
to $6.
_Science and Health_, _Pref._ VIII.--"The question, What is Truth? is
answered by demonstration--by healing disease and sin."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--That truth can only be set on its absolute
end by curing megrims and other unhealthiness, has been incontrovertibly
settled by the religious experience of "Mother Eddy" herself. When she
rose into the revelation that matter is nothing--not even a phenomenal
condition of anything--the truth instantly spliced her broken spine. It
was this "demonstration by healing" that transformed the ignorant,
deluded, mesmerized Mary M. Patterson, into our holy, scientific,
infallible Lady of the "Precious Volume."
_Science and Health_, 2 _and_ 3, _passim._--"The divine Spirit, testifying
through Christian Science, unfolded to me the demonstrable fact that
matter possesses neither sensation nor life.... Human experiences show the
falsity of all material things.... My discovery that erring, mortal,
misnamed _mind_, produces all the organism and action of the mortal body,
led up to my demonstration that Mind is All, and matter is naught, as the
leading factor in Mind-Science.... The revelation of Truth in the
understanding came to me gradually, and apparently through divine power.
When a new spiritual idea is borne to earth, the prophetic Scripture of
Isaiah is renewedly fulfilled: 'Unto us a child is born ... and his name
shall be Wonderful.'"
_Interpretation "in Science."_--That there is absolutely nothing in
anything you see, feel, hear, taste or smell, is eternally laid down as
"the leading factor in Mind-Science." Though the ideas of Mrs. Mary Baker
G. Eddy are all wonderful, this is the most surpassingly wonderful of all.
But Mother Eddy herself is much more wonderful than even her ideas. As
little Mary Baker she was wonderful in her likeness to little Samuel; as
Mary M. Patterson, she was more wonderful as a mesmerized victim of Dr.
Quimby; and, as Mary Baker G. Eddy, she is most wonderful, as the Ark of
the Covenant of the only true Medicinal Religion. All Mother Eddy's
writings point, all the time, to this beautiful lesson.
_Science and Health_, 5.--"No analogy exists between the vague hypotheses
of Agnosticism, or Millenarianism, and the demonstrable truths of
Christian Science; and I find the will, or sensuous reason of the human
mind, to be opposed to the divine Mind, expressed through Divine Science."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--All the ancient and modern "isms," except
Eddyism, we must sit on and blot out. The most of them are unpopular, and
don't bring us in anything. But he who opposes Eddyism contradicts the
Divine Mind, expressed through Divine Science, which, logically, must be
the production of our Divine Mother.
_Science and Health_, 8.--"The phrase _mortal mind_ implies something
untrue, and, therefore, unreal."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--This truth is to be taken as infallible on
all occasions. Still, the unreality, mortal mind, is a thing to be healed
by Christian Science, and there is money in the metaphysical pills.
_Science and Health_, 21.--"There is no physical science, inasmuch, as
all true Science proceeds from divine Intelligence."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--Shut up your arithmetic, geometry,
physics, and astronomy. They amount to nothing. There is no truly
scientific book except _Science and Health_.
_Science and Health_, 25.--"Must Christian Science come through the
Christian churches, as some insist? This Science has come already, and
come through the one whom God called."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--Christian Science, my beloved, is
copyrighted property, and can only spread through the owner and her
deputies. The "one whom God called" is Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy.
_Science and Health_, 244, 245, 473, 284.--"The act of describing disease
makes the disease. Warning people against disease frightens them into it.
This obnoxious habit ought to cease.... The unscientific practitioner
says: 'You are ill; you must rest.' Science objects to all this.... Mind
controls the body and brain.... A cup of tea is not the equal of Truth....
A material body is a mortal belief.... The medicine of Science is divine
Mind."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--Your doctor is a fool, whether he be
allopathic, homeopathic, magnetic, or even of any _unauthorized_ school of
mind-healing. Dismiss him, and send for a Christian Science M. D.,
authorized to practise by Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. If he can't cure you,
it will not be his fault; it will be simply because your mind, or the
minds around you, or both, are out of tune with _Science and Health_ and
_its Key to the Scriptures_.
_Science and Health_, 259, 480, 475.--"Electricity, the offspring of
finite mind, is unreal.... The physical universe expresses the conscious
and unconscious thoughts of mortals. Physical force and mortal mind are
one.... Matter is neither self-existent nor a product of Spirit. An image
of mortal thought, reflected on the retina, is all the eye beholds."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--That a force like electricity has no
reference to any principle or power but finite mind, will always be hard
for an unscientized person to believe. But Mother Eddy knows, and her word
must go. Still, the unreality of electricity is not quite so to people
"out of science." If one toys with a trolley-wire before he has read and
understood _Science and Health_, he may experience a slight shock of
reality, if he lives long enough. But one who has purchased Mrs. Eddy's
great work, and who reads it constantly, need have no fear of
electrocution, or anything else. His mortal mind has pretty nearly
departed from him. His "physical universe" is hardly a picture of
"conscious thoughts," and his "unconscious thoughts," whatever such things
may be, will never lead him into much danger.
_Science and Health_, 487.--"Science reveals material man as a dream at
all times, and never as the real Being."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--Mortals are nothing. The One and Only
Being is the Father-and-Mother God of Christian Science. Our Mother is
Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy.
_Science and Health_, 411.--"The Scientist knows there can be no
hereditary disease, since matter cannot transmit good or evil intelligence
to man, and Mind produces no pain in matter."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--On the ground that mind and matter are
absolutely unconnected, there can be no doubt of there being no hereditary
disease. On the same ground there can be no heredity itself, and no world
for heredity to exist in. How true it is, "in Science," that all actuality
has no actuality in it!
_Science and Health_, 28.--"The true Logos is demonstrably Christian
Science."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--We know, too, from Mrs. Eddy's "precious
volume," that Christian Science, in addition to being the Logos, is the
Holy Comforter. Thus her copyrighted religion is two-thirds of the
Trinity.
_Science and Health_, 411.--"The daily ablutions of an infant are no more
natural or necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of
water every day, and covering it with dirt, in order to make it thrive
more vigorously thereafter in its native element.... Water is not the
natural habitat of humanity."
_Interpretation "in Science."_--Don't take the trouble to wash the baby.
His body is only an expression of mortal mind, and is thus so mussed up
with error and nothingness that water will never get him clean. His proper
habitat is "Science." Scrub his "conscious and unconscious thoughts" with
Christian Science, and never mind the rest of him.
We shall make but one more quotation, here, from Mrs. Eddy's "Divine
comedy," _Science and Health_. There is no use of being too serious with
it. History will soon take it as mostly a "grim joke" on metaphysics,
theology, and medicine. But one thing must give us pause. On approaching
the Lord's Prayer, one feels himself on solemn ground, if such ground
there be anywhere in life, and for once, if never before, puts on the
mantle of conservatism. But, to Mrs. Eddy, the words of Jesus in devotion
and supplication--at once the simplest and grandest words ever
uttered--require her "spiritual interpretation." What, in her index to
_Science and Health_, she terms the "Spiritualized version" of the Lord's
Prayer is this:
"Our Father and Mother God, all-harmonized, Adorable One. Ever present and
Omnipotent. Thy Supremacy appears as matter disappears. Give us grace for
to-day; Thou fillest the famished affections; and Love is reflected in
love. And leavest us not in temptation, but freest us from sin, disease
and death; for Thou art all Substance, Life, Truth, and Love,
forever.--_So be it._"
The author of the _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ tells of a poet who
"Breaks into blank the Gospel of St. Luke,
And boldly pilfers from the Pentateuch;
And, undisturbed by conscientious qualms,
Perverts the Prophets, and purloins the psalms."
Let any one not "in Science" ask himself if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy has not
gone farther and done worse.
CHAPTER VIII.
"CHRISTIAN-SCIENCE" ORGANIZING FORCES.
As Mrs. Eddy has been a manufacturer and vender of "Christian Science" for
a comparatively short time--only a quarter of a century--many good people
who knew her at the inception of that successful industry are still on
earth, in an active condition of "mortal mind." They have volunteered to
furnish for this brief book a variety of plain and ornamental information
that is not essential to it. But, in justice to history and biography, one
point must not be omitted. They all agree that "Mother Eddy," like Cæsar,
the Standard Oil Company, and the Sugar Trust, has more organizing
capacity than "the sons and daughters of God," to use her own phrase,
generally possess. With this capacity, it is also agreed that never a
Bonaparte, never a Jay Gould, never a Pierpont Morgan, could be more
handy in surmounting all over-nice impediments to practical success.
Thus by her rare combination of terrestrial and celestial genius, "Mother
Eddy" has been able to hold her copyrighted religion, "Christian Science,"
strictly under her personal regnancy, and direct it to the highest
financial, doctrinal, and healing ends. She permits no tinge of private
judgment, no stain of unauthorized opinion, and no mere finite criticism,
so far as she can silence it. She is the Church, and membership is
obedience. Hence she bitterly antagonizes all independent agencies of
scientific salvation, though with eyes rolled up, and with fervent
proclamations of unbounded "love." In her _Science and Health_, she
advises her readers not to read other "scientific works," as they are full
of "materialism," and are not "Scientifically Christian." Directly or
indirectly, too, there is always the point that money can be much better
invested in Mrs. Eddy's own "sacred" and "positively demonstrated"
writings. It would almost seem that, in her universal motherhood, Mrs.
Mary Baker G. Eddy must have borne Mohammed's great soldier who burned
the Alexandrian library in devotion to the _Koran_.
To a great organizer, a wholesale business is always more attractive than
retail trade. It is handled quite as easily, with less detail, and
thousands of small merchants contribute to the proceeds. The able founder
of "Christian Science" early realized this fact--in her case drawn from on
high, but sometimes reached through commercial experience. Having retired
into the wilderness of her mind, far from all monitions of "sense"; having
trained her memory to forget the existence of "matter," "error," and Mary
M. Patterson; having taken a three-years' vacation with her only peers,
"the ancient worthies" and "the Scriptures"; Mrs. Eddy came back at last,
among the human species, with the metaphysics and curative formulas of
"Christian Science." Then came practical transactions in "revelations" and
"mental medicine," which soon rivaled the sales of Mrs. Winslow's Soothing
Syrup and Lydia Pinkham's celebrated compound.
Though Mrs. Eddy has gradually taken into her service various literary
experts, theologico-commercial travelers and metaphysical auctioneers,
she has always supervised, in person, the wholesale department of
"Christian Science." On her return from the skies, she brought down a
large collection of documents in which "the whole science" was condensed
and canned, and all the medical prescriptions required to fulfil a
millennium of holiness and health. With these documents in hand she formed
classes of "loyal students," her definition of "loyalty" being "allegiance
to God" (as manifested in Mary Baker); "subordination of the human" (the
student) "to the divine" (the teacher); "steadfast justice" (no wobbling
over the cash); and strict adherence to "divine Truth and Love" (the
Mother of the Logos and the Holy Comforter forever glorified).
To be more specific, it was in the year 1867 that Mrs. Mary Baker Glover
Patterson, freed by divorce from the last-named culprit, and married to
Asa Gilbert Eddy, began, as she records it, the teaching of "Christian
Science Mind Healing" to "one student." Here was a good seed sown in
fructifying ground; for, in 1881, it had grown to be "The Massachusetts
Metaphysical College" of Boston.[36]
This vast institution was managed by Mrs. Eddy as chief impartress of
"science," her assistants being her husband, her adopted son, and a
General Bates. These four "scientists" constituted the faculty.
Mrs. Eddy's last husband is described, by those who knew him, as one of
the most humble and obedient men that ever blest a perfect woman in
immaculate matrimony. His value as a college professor may be inferred
from one reminiscence of him. His supreme better-half once sued a poor
young doctor who had fallen away from "science," and taken to homeopathy,
that she might collect her fee for having taught him "Christian Science
therapeutics." Her husband, Asa, was a witness for her, to prove the
pecuniary value of her instruction, and was asked, among other questions,
"What is Man?" "As near as I can make it out," replied Prof. Eddy, "Man is
an image." Mrs. Eddy lost her case, as the court was too unspiritual to
reduce her "metaphysics" to dollars and cents.[37] But the good Asa
showed that he was an "image" of Mary; and, in her _Retrospection and
Introspection_, she has gratefully embalmed his memory in a text from the
Psalms.
"Mark the perfect _man_, and behold the upright: for the end of _that_ man
_is_ peace."
The italics are not in the psalm, but are Mary's.
Some further conception of "the perfect man," Prof. Eddy, and the value of
Mother Eddy's estimate of him, may be gathered from an item which appeared
in the Boston _Evening Herald_ of December 7, 1878, stating that "Edward
J. Arens and Asa G. Eddy were indicted to-day by the Grand Jury for
soliciting James H. Sargent to kill Daniel H. Spofford." It appears that
Spofford, in order to probe the matter, led on the conspiracy, and so
became technically involved in it himself. Thus the affair became so mixed
up that, according to the official court-record, the District Attorney
concluded not to prosecute the indictment, and Arens and Eddy were
"discharged _on payment of costs_." The divine "Mother Eddy" surely could
not have instigated a conspiracy to murder Spofford (a troublesome
backslider from "Science"), though he and many other backsliders, who know
her well, have long labored under the impression that the whole enterprise
was hers.
The human head is a queer bulb, and often seems to be a direct evolution
from the squash. This hypothesis, illustrated by the researches of Darwin
and his school, accounts for the rapid growth of Mrs. Eddy's Massachusetts
Metaphysical College from 1881 to 1889, when, in the latter year, she
closed it. At that time, as she recollects things, her college was not
only filled, but "flooded" with students from all parts of America,
Europe, and the world. Three hundred applications were on the list, and
the number was rapidly increasing.[38]
If Mrs. Eddy were not so far above the world and the flesh that her
reasons for things seldom comport with a sub-lunar search into them, it
might be possible to believe that she discontinued her college because she
feared that "material organization," applied to "Christian Science,"
would obstruct "Love's Spiritual compact." Whatever it means, this at
least is what she _says_. The success of her college had shown her the
danger of placing people on "earthly pinnacles"; and even "mortal mind"
can see that such a setting-up might lead students away from the primal
Mother and the central contribution-box. Besides, she had always had
"conscientious scruples" against "giving diplomas" when she thought of
those same "earthly pinnacles."
It may throw some light on the sudden closing of "The Massachusetts
Metaphysical College" to note that, notwithstanding "Mother" Eddy's
"conscientious scruples" against granting mere "diplomas," she had issued
hundreds of metaphysico-medical degrees at high prices.
According to a statement of hers, she obtained her college charter from
the State of Massachusetts in 1881, "with the right to grant degrees." But
the act on which this grant was based was repealed in 1882. Then, in 1883,
the conferring of "any diploma or degree" by any "corporation" or
"association," was made a legal offense, punishable by a fine of not less
than $500. Being the "president," not of any "corporation" or
"association," but of a regular "college" (with a faculty of three beside
herself), Mother Eddy's legal mind has held that this law, if aimed at
her, failed to hit, though it knocked out all other mind-healing
colleges.[39] But, in 1889, when, as persistent rumor has it, the problem
was about to be solved by legal process against "Mother Eddy," the subject
was practically closed by the closing of her "college," and by her
retirement to New Hampshire, where "the wicked cease from troubling and
the weary are at rest."
Considering Mrs. Eddy's kind of "college-faculty" and "board," together
with her exhaustive copyrights and the hierarchical monopolies consequent
upon them, it is quite conceivable that when time was ripe she had no
difficulty in "unanimously" passing resolutions to discontinue her
"flourishing school." The little joker in this pack of resolutions soon
came out in one of them. It deftly touched the matter of "organization,"
and then propounded that "the hour" had "come" when "the great need" was
for "more of the Spirit," not "the letter," and that _Science and Health_
was the spirit's nutriment.
It is not directly stated by Mother Eddy in this connection, that God
Himself fixed the scale of prices for her book; but she does say it was
"God" who "impelled" her to "set a price" for her "instruction in
Christian-Science Mind-Healing." The price was three-hundred dollars a
head, for a college course of three weeks. At first she "shrank from
asking it." But "a strange providence" led Mary to these terms, and "God,"
she asserts, "has since shown" her, in "multitudinous ways," the "wisdom"
of her "decision."[40] The "strange providence" and "the multitudinous
ways" are not explained by her; but the "wisdom" of gathering together fat
bank-deposits is unanimously acknowledged in the Church Scientist.
When our republic was a hundred years old, it had become worthy of having
"The First Christian Science Association." That body was accordingly
organized, on the fourth day of July, 1876, by Mrs. Eddy and six of her
head-light reflectors. Three years later, the Association balloted on
forming a Church, and the Eddyites won by a large plurality. Rev. Mary
Baker G. Eddy was of course chosen its "first pastor," and during her
ministration it prospered in numbers and popularity. That is, she says so
in her _Retrospection and Introspection_. But owing to tons of work, which
increased upon her, she was unable to give the Church sufficient
attention, and no son or daughter of "Science" was competent to take her
place. Her church was "envied" and "molested" by other churches, and there
was danger of "Christian warfare"--which might have led to a diminution of
proselytes, and more horrible still, a loss of shekels. In such an
extremity, she "recommended" the dissolution of the First Church
Scientist, and again, as ever, her recommendation went through "without a
dissenting voice."
"This measure," she tells us, was followed by "a great revival" in the way
of "mutual love," with "spiritual power" and "prosperity." Those, we may
be sure, were money-making times. Mrs. Eddy's reasons for dissolving her
church were doubtless infallible. Still, that same church at once
resurrected itself and exalted its horn--the "Mother Church" in Boston,
and then children and grandchildren galore, in hundreds of secondary
"Hubs" and their suburbs.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ONE TRUE "MOTHER CHURCH."[41]
It was in 1889, says Mrs. Eddy, that "I gave a lot of land in Boston," on
which to erect "a church edifice" as "a temple for Christian Science
worship."[42] The land, she is particular to say, was worth "twenty
thousand dollars," and was "rising in value." As she has been careful to
mention this increment of the "rise"--not hiding it under a bushel, but
setting it on top of the cover--we must be sure to add it to the sum of
the original benevolence.
But how much labor could be saved by a meek historian if only Mrs. Eddy's
word could ever be safely accepted without looking behind it! On
consulting the official registry of such matters, one finds that before
Mrs. Eddy gave her land to the Church of Christ Scientist, _the Church
itself owned the land_, under a mortgage of nine thousand dollars, four
thousand of which had been paid off. The balance was five thousand. The
provident "Mother" bought this mortgage and foreclosed it. She then
conveyed the property to the trustees of the First Church of Christ
Scientist, reserving the right to re-enter and repossess the land, with
improvements, in case a church erected on it should not be run to suit
her. All this was specified in ten conditions, which the angels have not
recorded in her biography.
Adjoining the Eddy castle of "metaphysics" are two lots on which stand two
buildings of the Christian Science Publishing Society. This real estate
was set down in February, 1898, by the editor of "The Christian Science
Journal," to be worth not less than twenty-two thousand dollars. On
January 25th, 1898, "Mother" Eddy generously conveyed it to the First
Church of Christ Scientist. _But_, three days before--on the 21st of
January, 1898--the Christian Science Publishing Society, for the sum of
one dollar, had _conveyed it to her_. The string tied to her
_re_-conveyance was that she should "have and occupy so much room
conveniently and pleasantly located" in the establishment, as might "be
necessary to carry on the publication and sale" of her "books" and
"literature"--a reservation of "room" which, under legal stress might
easily be interpreted to mean the whole thing--it being distinctively a
"publishing house."
With Mother Eddy's donation of January 25th, 1898, she threw in "The
Christian Science Journal" and "all the literary publications of the
Society"--these having been turned over to her with other things, for one
dollar, on January 21st, 1898--she saving to herself "only the right to
copyright the 'Journal' in her own name--an excellent way to make it
self-supporting, with no liability on her part to incur its debts, while
yet she could hold it under her absolute dictation.
"Let us endeavor," says the editor of "The Christian Science Journal"
(February, 1898), "to lift up our hearts in thankfulness to God ... and to
his servant, our Mother in Israel, for these evidences of a generosity and
self-sacrifice that appeal to our deepest sense of gratitude, even while
surpassing our comprehension."
Now such an evidence of generosity and self-sacrifice may intelligibly
"surpass" the "comprehension" of any stipendary of Mrs. Eddy' paid to
write such stuff as the foregoing; but Mary Baker Eddy's real bounty,
generosity, self-sacrifice and benefaction, consisted in cancelling a
mortgage of five thousand dollars, by which, on land thus obtained, a
church costing other people two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was
soon built to her glory, she keeping a Shylock grip on the land, church
and the adjacent property of her functionaries, with all its appurtenances
that were good for anything.
When "Mother Eddy" casts a loaf of bread upon the waters, it is always
safe to look for a hundred loaves on the way back to her.
"The First Church Scientist"--the edifice erected on Mrs. Eddy's donation
of land--is a handsome structure of rough granite, looking something like
a small armory with a big tower. This sacred castle of "metaphysics" is
situated a little on the outskirts of residential fashion in the
Hub-City, the district thereof being the Back Bay. It is accessible to the
world, when once in Boston, by "the electrics" and a short walk. As a
place of scientifico-religious assemblage, the building seats twelve
hundred actual "scientists" in the flesh, and the sympathetic spirits of
some twelve thousand other "members," absent throughout the country. On
this account, some Eddyites who have never seen it regard its size as
rivaling that of the earth.
The Cathedral (scientist) has much stained glass, and on nearly every
window is depicted some Mary; for all _good_ Marys, particularly the Marys
of the Bible, inferentially point to Mary Baker Eddy. This Mary's _Science
and Health_ is exceedingly prominent in the multi-colored glass, and so
gives countenance to all the representations taken from the Scriptures.
An organ is prominent--a large, harmonious present from a gentleman who
thinks that somebody was cured of something by Christian Science.
The church has two pretty pulpits side by side, from one of which the
Bible is read, while from the other, that ancient book is kept straight
by the reading of its only true meaning from _Science and Health_.
Singing the praises of "Immortal Mind," as discovered by Mrs. Eddy,
constitutes a part of the services, but there is no preaching--which is
just as well, perhaps, but needs a word of explanation.
Preaching used to be allowed "in Science"; but some of Mother Eddy's
apostles, having just enough knowledge for their creed, yet great gifts of
speech, sermonized, it is said, with such honest zeal that their eloquence
was in danger of casting an unglorified shadow on the Mother herself. It
must be stated, indeed, that sundry who have listened to St. Mary
(scientist) affirm that her divine pen has always been much more potent
than her divine tongue. And some go so far as to declare that her sermons,
when she preached, were often dull to the non-elect, even if they cured
every disease within ten miles of them. However these things may have
been, Mrs. Eddy, early in 1895, issued the following ecclesiastical
edict:[43]
"Humbly, and as I believe divinely directed, I hereby ordain that the
Bible and _Science and Health_ with _Key to the Scriptures_ shall
hereafter be the only pastor of the Church of Christ, Scientist,
throughout our land, and in other lands."
This edict prevented Mrs. Eddy's theological subordinates from setting
themselves up on "earthly pinnacles." Mother Eddy at the same time decreed
this:
"No copies of my books are allowed to be written, and read from
manuscript, either in private, or in public assemblies, except by their
author."
She included the commandment that
"The reader of _Science and Health_ with _Key to the Scriptures_, shall
commence by announcing the full title of this book, with the name of the
author, and afterwards repeat at each reading its abbreviated title."
Directions followed regarding classes in "Christian Science"--the number
of pupils each teacher might instruct, and the annual number of
classes--all to be taught "from the Christian Science text-book."
Thus "Mother" Eddy's edict of 1895, abolishing pulpiteers "in Science,"
while it redounded widely to her own glory, piously amplified, also, the
proceeds of her "precious volume," _Science and Health_. But to the
innocent lambkins of her church, she said:
"Teaching Christian Science shall be no question of money, but of morals
and uplifting the race."
So that lovely bird, the ostrich, still buries her head in the sand, but
leaves out much that ornaments the landscape.
In a rounded corner of the First Church Scientist, but conspicuous from
the main passage, is a little apartment celebrated as "The Mother's Room."
There is no use of mentioning the Mother Church "in Science," without
dwelling on "The Mother's Room." It is never done, especially by any
"Scientist." The Church is holy, throughout; but that room is the
demonstrated environment of Immortal Mind.
The entrance to "The Mother's Room" is through a white-marble arch,
lustrous to behold. Over the door, cut into the marble, is the
inscription, "LOVE." It is not "love of money," or "love of flattery," but
just "LOVE." On the floor of the entrance we read in mosaic: "Mother's
Room. The children's offering"--which signifies that Mother Eddy knows how
to attract the pennies of little Scientists as well as the dollars of her
larger infants.
As you enter the room, you tread on white-marble mosaic, sprayed with figs
and fig-leaves, and you feel an emanation of pale green and old rose. If
you know your business, you are struck with awe on being in this
holy-of-holies.
On your right is a mantel of white Italian marble and gold, with an open
fireplace, wherein to throw all your mortal thoughts, that they may be
consumed. Opposite the mantel on your left, is a rather large painting,
set back in the wall, but well lighted by electricity and divine science.
It shows the sacred chair in which Mrs. Eddy sat when she wrote _Science
and Health_. The chair is empty--as typical, perhaps, of her departure
from Boston when she closed her "Metaphysical College." As Mrs. Eddy has
no need of a table when she writes, but can perform miracles of literature
on a pad, the picture shows this phenomenon. Sheets of her manuscript are
scattered on the floor, illustrating the logical chaos which fills them.
A part of "The Mother's Room" is fenced off by a ribbon, to protect a rug
made from the downy breasts of five hundred eider-ducks. The legend, as
told by the guide, is that "no man's hand ever touched this rug." It is
sacred to the Mother's immaculate foot. But it was not manufactured by the
Audubon Society.
A beautiful showcase, of white and gold, ornaments the room, and in it are
the white and gold editions of Mrs. Eddy's works. They are samples of what
you can buy at the regular price, and are very tempting to wealthy
"scientists."
The Mother's room has a gorgeous bay-window, or three windows in one, of
stained glass. The Mother herself is there, searching the Scriptures,
encircled by a halo from the star of Bethlehem. The Christian Science seal
is emblazoned on the window, and a little girl is there, reading _Science
and Health_ to an old man. The little girl must be Mary Baker and the old
man, probably, is Moses or Abraham. An alabaster bee-hive must not be
forgotten, which contains the names of the little busy bees "in
Science"--those children who squeezed out the cash to construct the room.
As you turn and go out, you observe, on the right, an alcove, which
contains a folding bed, to be pulled out into the main room in case of
use; for the alcove itself is almost as small as a mind that disagrees
with Mrs. Eddy.
At your left--still going out--there is a toilet-room, corresponding to
the alcove, but on the other side of the arch and doorway. In practical
construction, this toilet-room is very much like other small inclosures
adapted to the same ends. The chief difference, here, is that all the
water-pipes, faucets, and such fixtures, are plated with gold. Thus Mother
Eddy's lavatory proudly reminds her of Solomon's temple at Jerusalem.
It is said that "Mother Eddy" has never slept in "The Mother's Room" but
once. This one occasion, however, was quite enough to sanctify it
forever.
CHAPTER X.
A MARTYR TO "SCIENCE."
"Christian Science," though its span be brief, has produced one of the
most exceptional martyrs that ever lived and prospered. It is a woman, of
course; for men, as a rule, have now become too "mortal-minded" for
sacrificial victims.
The lady referred to is a Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury. Boston is her
habitat. She was long a follower of Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and was a
preacher of the gospel, _Science and Health_. She talked and prayed, she
wrote and traveled, all "in Science," until she became a public personage,
celebrated throughout the dominions of the Eddyites. Then at last there
was "War in Heaven"--which is the title of one of Mrs. Woodbury's
books,[44] and she was excommunicated from the Mother Church Scientist of
the Boston Back Bay.
Now Mrs. Woodbury is not a lady who can be excommunicated from a church
without giving that church fair returns for the outlay. Mrs. Woodbury has
a pen, and there is black ink on it. She has attorneys quick to exchange
legal process for bank notes redeemable in gold. The lady has turned her
pen against "Mother Eddy," and cast ink-spots on the "Mother's" religion,
not to say her personal character. The Woodbury lawyers have been let
loose upon "the Mother" to sue for ethical redress and monetary
damages.[45]
Mrs. Woodbury entered "Science" very young--a fact on account of which let
us excuse her, as well as we can, for ever entering it at all. She thought
she was one of the "healed" in the Eddy faith, and, later, she imagined
that her reading a passage or two from _Science and Health_ snatched one
of her children from the jaws of death. Her _War in Heaven_ tells us this
story, and it may do no harm to trust it is true.
Mrs. Woodbury has the reputation of never doing things by halves, but of
attending to business religiously, and of attending to religion in a
business way. Having once entered "Christian Science," she pursued that
vocation with great metaphysical and financial success, until suddenly, on
the 4th of April, 1896, came the bolt of excommunication.
It can readily be understood that conventional respectability is a
necessary and profitable department of "The Eddy Church Scientist," and
that so shifty an ecclesiastic as "Mother Eddy" can scent opprobrium from
afar. Whereto applies certain "Christian-Science" history.
Soon after the excommunication of the apostle Josephine--the latter part
of the same year--she was attacked at law by a Mr. Fred D. Chamberlain, in
the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars, on the charge that she had
alienated the affection and companionship of his wife. The case got into
print, and being displayed under large heads in the Boston _Traveler_ of
December 12th, 1896 and thereafter, a suit was instituted against Mr.
Chamberlain and that paper for libel.[46]
It appears from the files of the _Traveler_ that its industrious editor
collected a large variety of statements, letters, and interviews, for the
purpose of showing his readers, that, among Mrs. Woodbury's religious
accomplishments--whether it were due to suggestion, elective affinity,
hypnotism, or Christian Science--she possessed a mighty gift of drawing
simple souls--the rich invariably preferred--into the select congregation
of her fleecy followers. Then, at two hundred dollars a follower, she was
depicted as converting the sinners of other sects to "Christian Science."
It will be observed that Mrs. Woodbury seemingly dealt in "metaphysics" at
cut prices, the "Mother's" regular rate for instruction being three
hundred dollars, not two hundred. But, for value received from Mrs.
Woodbury's "loyal students"--she, like "the Mother," so naming her
disciples--from seven to ten lessons only, according to the _Traveler_,
were imparted to them. Then the course was indefinitely repeated, in
accordance with the demand that could be created for the healing staples.
Here, to be sure, was something that might have greatly offended "Mother
Eddy." Yet daughter Woodbury's cut prices were only colorable, not actual;
for, in the frequent repetition of the same wisdom and religiosity to the
same "loyal students," she must have done less work for more money than
was ever done even in the Mother's college itself.
Again, if we follow newspaper files and court records in the case of the
Boston _Traveler_,[47] we are told that Mrs. Woodbury had a family
interest in putting on the market certain stock in a hot-air engine--a
kind of "Christian Science" stock in which, if her "loyal students" took a
religious flyer, their secular dealings would be sure to turn up with the
right end in the air. This, perhaps, was a prime investment; but, on
investigation, one "loyal student"--plaintiff Chamberlain of the suit we
have touched--somehow received the impression, though doubtless through
"mortal mind," that the holy engine stock had a slight smell of the Keeley
motor. Unetherealized man that he was, this affliction of his base common
sense was the immediate cause, he declared, of all his trouble. His pious
wife was unable to bear such an affront to divinity in the person of her
"teacher," St. Josephine Woodbury. So the "teacher" stuck to the wife, and
the husband was left out in the cold.[48]
That Boston newspaper, the _Traveler_, in spreading the Chamberlain
unpleasantness, was assiduously biographical. Particulars can be
curtailed. It is only necessary to say that the distinguished Mrs.
Woodbury was depicted as a self-made woman who had once been known to
plain environments, but who, with preaching, healing, scientific religion
and engine-stock, had become financially as well as spiritually beatified.
Finally she had reached a shining abode on Commonwealth Avenue--that kind
of mansion, in Boston, being the very next thing to "a mansion in the
skies."
Her "loyal students," it is true, were not represented by the _Traveler_
as having been enriched in the same way. Still, if already wealthy, as
most of them were said to be, what was the use of it? Might they not
better come unto St. Josephine Woodbury, and cast upon her the dross and
sorrow of their material accumulations?
As described in the _Traveler_ print, these "loyal students" were, for the
most part, rather young people, rich in their own right, or so endeared to
their parents that neither gold nor silver, if it could be given, was
denied to them. Once in the woods and groves of Teacher Woodbury's
"Christian Science" paradise, these charmed innocents were turned into
missionaries to their families, where souls might be saved and further
possessions might accrue to a blessed instructor. If the heads of these
families would not turn from the wicked ways of the world and their own
churches, and bring gifts to the shrine of Christian Science, then the
"loyal students" were taught to shake the dust from their feet, and depart
from among the unholy.
Thus were the Scriptures fulfilled "in Science." But the _Traveler_ made
it to appear that such doctrine set daughter against father, son against
mother, and wife against husband.
So, indeed, the doctrine was made to appear in a letter written by Saint
Woodbury herself and published in the _Traveler_ over her full name.[49]
Therein was this preachment:
"The Bible says that the teachings of Jesus rightly practised, will,
_must_, set at variance the members of any household, some of whom do, and
some of whom do not, imbibe the faith.... God's will be done. The command
is still on the elect to come out from the world, and to separate and to
shake the dust from their feet, of any house which will not receive the
peace bestowed."
Mrs. Woodbury, having thus justified her religion and her economics by
Scripture, proceeded to justify Scripture itself by the Absolute--the
example of Mrs. Eddy. St. Josephine went on, in her letter, thus:
"When the Discerner of this Science first apprehended the demands of this
Religion and system of ethics, she was forced to withdraw from the
Congregational Church.... I have been informed, also, that not one of her
family ever held her faith in anything but active contempt."
This latter revelation to St. Woodbury, regarding Saint Mary Baker Eddy
and her relatives, is probably true. Others have received the same
information. But when the chosen one was rejected of the Baker family,
particularly of its affluent members, it is affirmed that the spirit of
"Science" arose within Mary, like a mighty tantrum, and, recalling her
early likeness to Samuel and the Hebrews, she exclaimed with "immortal
mind," "I will yet roll in wealth!" These words of the prophetess-Mother
are sweet to the ear of Christian Science, which admonishes its adherents
to go and do likewise--assuring them that if steadfast "in Science," they
will be sure to stand solid in Dunn and Bradstreet.
It is well that our condition of existence, whatever may be its
metaphysical bases, is not all tragedy, but is relieved by a border of
comedy. According to a tale of Christian Science, as told by the Boston
_Traveler_, Mrs. Woodbury, when in the prime of her healing illumination,
with its full returns, felt on one occasion that piety would be advanced
if a "loyal student" of hers--a lady of means--should add a promising
husband to the true Church. It was done. Then, the ever-watchful "teacher"
sent forth on the wedding tour a third "loyal student"--a virgin with her
lamp trimmed and burning--to see that neither of the other twain should
lapse from grace and the certainty of further contributions.
The complaint against the _Traveler_ newspaper got into court on the 11th
of January, 1897. Short work was made of it. Notwithstanding all the
divine science incarnate in St. Josephine C. Woodbury, His Honor the
Judge, Dewey by name, excluded her from the court-room, that she might not
contribute to the examination of her witnesses any eye-beams of hypnotism.
As this book is not designed to be improperly personal, but simply an
exposition of the claims, doctrines, and effects, of Christian Science,
all unnecessary use of individual names must be avoided. But a few are
indispensable; and people who are mentioned here have already got
themselves corruscatingly into print.
The first witness for Mrs. Woodbury--who turned out also to be the
last--was a Mr. Alfred M. Potter. He testified that he was a brother of
Mrs. Fred D. Chamberlain--the lady said to be alienated from her
husband--and that he and his sister boarded with the Woodburys. He was
estranged from his family, he said, except that one sister, but Mrs.
Woodbury was not the cause of it.
As the _Traveler_ summed up one point of the court-records, Mr. Potter, in
the past year, had paid the husband of Mrs. Woodbury thirteen thousand
dollars outside of board and room. He had paid Mrs. Woodbury "between a
thousand and eleven hundred dollars for instructions for himself." But, in
the summer of 1896, there was a European trip for Mr. Potter and the
Woodburys. How could a "loyal student," young and wealthy, venture abroad
without his "teacher?" And why was not his money well expended for
spiritual pleasures, on the way, if St. Josephine and Mr. Woodbury took
good care of Mr. Potter, and brought him safe home?
But the most extraordinary matter in connection with Mr. Potter's
depositions was a certain quasi-confirmation of a story that came to the
_Traveler_ and had been published, alleging that, on the authority of Mrs.
Woodbury, the ancient and most infinitely closed of all miracles, "the
immaculate conception," had been repeated under the advanced dispensation
of Mother Eddy's religion. Such was declared by various "loyal students"
of Mrs. Woodbury to have been the claim of their exalted "teacher," to
whom a son was born, named "Prince," an abbreviation of his full title,
"the Prince of Peace." Mr. Potter came short of corroborating the whole of
this miracle, but gave substantially the version of it which Mrs. Woodbury
presented to the public, after the trial, in the pages of her "War in
Heaven." There she says:
"On the morning of June 11th, 1890, there was born to me a baby boy;
though, till his sharp birth-cry saluted my ears, I had not realized that
prospective maternity was the interpretation of preceding months of
physical discomfort.... An hour after the birth I rose. In the afternoon I
was up and dressed, and at night dined with my family.... We named our boy
Prince Woodbury, partly because he came into our family as a veritable
harbinger of peace."
Witness Potter testified that he understood, through Mrs. Woodbury, that
"she had no knowledge of the birth of Prince" until she found him with
her. This circumstance, he understood, "was through Christian Science."
When Mr. Potter, with a straight, truthful, honest face, gave this
testimony, it naturally affected the gravity of the bench, the bar, and
all others present, except Christian Scientists. There was reflected from
one to another the sardonic smile of "mortal mind." But the case went on
until presently a paper was put before Mr. Potter, by counsel for the
defense, that it might be identified.
The paper never got before the court. But the contents of it were very
peculiar. The paper, in fact, was a brutally blunt form of retraction on
the part of Mr. Fred D. Chamberlain, of every derogatory criticism of Mrs.
Woodbury he had ever made, and a meek submission to her brand of
"Christian Science." In the event of his not signing the paper, he was
given to understand that he must depart from the abode of his wife.
The document, it appears, was in the handwriting of the "loyal student,"
Mrs. Chamberlain, and was dictated by Mrs. Woodbury. But when it was
presented to Mr. Chamberlain for his signature, he had not only declined
to attach his name to it, but had retained the document.
The Woodbury counsel quickly protested against the admission of such
evidence, and the protest was judicious; for was not the whole case of
"alienation" substantially set down on that paper? Hence, too, what would
become of the libel-suit? But the court decided that the evidence was
admissible. Then, in such a shocking plight, what could an able Woodbury
lawyer do but decline, with virtuous indignation, to go on further with
the case? The short of it was that Judge Dewey discharged the defendants,
reprimanded the prosecution, and the noisy _Traveler_ had everything its
own way.[50]
As for the Chamberlain suit for damages "in Science," it was not pursued
to the monetary end. It was soon ascertained that the wife really had more
affection for her delectable "teacher" than any "loyal student" could be
expected to have for a mere husband. As a business necessity, a divorce
was then procured by Mr. Chamberlain, on the ground of desertion, and the
twain went separate ways.
It was not proved in Mrs. Woodbury's libel suit against the _Traveler_
that St. Josephine had claimed the full import of the _Traveler's_ story
about her "Prince." The proceedings, we have seen, were prematurely
stopped. But, after the newspaper's legal victory, it published sworn
statements from a number of people who would have been its witnesses had
the trial gone on. The most important was one made by Hon. George E.
Macomber, an ex-mayor of Augusta, Maine.[51] In the regular form of a
legal deposition he declared that he had known Mrs. Woodbury for several
years, his acquaintance with her having come through his wife, who had
taken lessons of her. He said:
"My wife came one day and said Mrs. Woodbury had had a child down at Ocean
Point which was a 'Second Christ,' was immaculately conceived, and that it
was the duty of her students to make presents to this 'Second Christ.'"
Mr. Macomber declined to make presents, and, according to his statement,
his wife's "eyes were opened," after a while, and she "pulled out" of
"Science."
The _Traveler's_ other witnesses may pass. It is only essential to say
that they were numerous, and that they all agreed with Mr. Macomber. One
of them testified, in an interview, that he had once gone so far in
neglect of his own family as to make a will in favor of "the Prince of
Peace." But our direct point here is only this.--There would seem to be no
doubt that St. Josephine Woodbury's "loyal students," far and wide, were
called upon to bear gifts to her celestial son. Hence, his origin had
palpable use as a financial mystery, whatever may have been its precise
theological bearings.
In "Christian Science," the doctrine here recorded has been logically
coupled with another doctrine--that of inconnubiality in wedlock. This
tenet, we can see, like the former, might result in money, goods and
bequests, for some attractive "teacher," which might otherwise be
squandered by a "student" in raising a family.
But the principle here imbedded "in Science" has not been special to Mrs.
Woodbury. Mother Eddy herself is the crystal background of all good
things, and this one, with the rest, must be credited to the fountain of
universal originality, _Science and Health_.[52] The pure simplicity of
any being who can seriously read that book to the end, inevitably fits him
to maintain with Christian Scientists, that, if children be not given to
parents under physical laws, the science of perfect purity will
ultimately evolve "_Children of the Soul_." "My husband and I," recently
exclaimed a vestal matron of Mrs. Eddy's following, "have long lived
together as brother and sister: isn't it beautiful?" "Perhaps it is,"
replied another matron, thus addressed, "but I am told it is generally
impracticable, except in Boston."
When last heard from, our contemporary "Prince of Peace" was a pretty
school-boy of wit beyond his years. May the world smile kindly on "Prince
Woodbury," who is in nowise to blame for any new-fangled religion; but may
heaven preserve him from any further involution with the sacraments of
"Christian Science."
Before bidding adieu to the heroine-martyr of our present chapter, one
more instance must be given of her work in a careless world--a very sad
instance, not to be treated lightly.
Among Mrs. Josephine Woodbury's "loyal students" for some time preceding
the year 1897, was a hand-maiden of "Christian Science," one Mary Nash.
The story of poor little Mary was told in the Boston _Traveler_,[53]
chiefly in the words of her father, when that paper was sued for libel "in
Science."
Mary Nash, as we summarize that story, lived at Augusta, Maine, and her
father, like our witness Macomber, had been a mayor of that city. He was a
busy man, but one who loved his daughter, and kept her in funds for what
he regarded as harmless fads and amusements.
Mary joined the "loyal students." Then, little by little, she absented
herself from Augusta, making frequent pilgrimages to Boston. The
pilgrimages grew in duration, until her home was seldom her habitation.
"Teacher" Woodbury had not only changed her heart, but her whole tenor of
mortal life, and Mary was completely born again into the most progressed
fears and phases of "Christian Science."
Letters followed to her father, asking for money, and demanding that he
and all his house should join "the loyal students." He forwarded the money
as occasion required, but his unregenerate neck stiffly declined
"Science." So Mary went no more to her father for weeks and months
together. He sent her mother and brother to her, with prayers that she
return to the family hearth-stone, if not to the family church. But she
was always sequestered from the influence of her relatives, by some "loyal
student" or other in the Woodbury collection of dutiful freaks.
Mary's soul was much disturbed at times, notwithstanding the
religio-scientific consolations of her surrounding guardians. She began to
demonstrate, in her own scattered little person, the one everlasting
assumption of "Christian Science," that the human body is an illusion to
be dispelled. In other words, Mary Nash was fast sinking into what
ordinary doctors of medicine and divinity term illness, and it became
extreme.
Then, not for the first time, her father, went to Boston himself, to take,
if possible, his daughter back to his care and her mother's heart, at the
Augusta home. But still, still--unless by some accident of a moment--she
was always under the eye and the power of a "metaphysical" keeper. Then
Mary said "no"--she "could not leave the fount of Christian Science." So
she stayed in Boston; for she was of age, and could select her castle and
companionship while she had the ways and means to maintain them.
Now what could a poor law-abiding citizen of New England, who had once
been a mayor, do in such a case? Had Mary's father been a wild citizen of
the West or the South, he might have taken his handy "gun" along with him,
and removed his child or "cleaned out the ranch." But Maine and
Massachusetts are too subdued for such stringent remedies. So Mayor Nash
mourned of "hypnotism," and offered--the distracted father that he
was--five hundred dollars, to release his daughter from the blessings of
her religion. This mercenary offer was spurned, as suspect perchance in
legal and ecclesiastic form; but the way was pointed out in which the
money might be received for lessons in Christian Science, at the Woodbury
cut-rates.
Meanwhile, it being ascertained that Mary Nash had a modest bank-account
in her name, the money was sent for, by herself nominally, but visibly
through a person in the number seven shoes of a "loyal student." The bank
men--who were not "in Science"--declined to pay Mary's demand, and
referred the matter to her father. He agreed with the bank in holding the
proceeds of his daughter's account, and his very stomach, not to say his
soul, rejected the thought of exchanging cash for religious instruction
from Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury.
So little Mary Nash became of no further promise to "Christian Science."
And there was no time to lose. Mary was plainly departing from the state
of deception--certainly such to _her_--called "earthly life." Hastily, at
last, she was permitted to journey home with her father, and presently the
sad man laid his daughter away in what to him was death.[54]
From the history of "Christian Science"--set down in these pages as the
thing really is--it must be clear to anybody not quite emptied of all
"mortal sense" that Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury has been the most logical
sequence, the most practical outcome, of the whole firmamental
illumination.
But, that the Church of St. Bunco should grow and prosper--or should even
hold its own among its honest innocents--it has been necessary for Mrs.
Eddy not only to preach "love" and "purity" in general, but to draw the
line of practical conduct somewhere short of blackmail, larceny and
homicide. St. Josephine Woodbury never committed a sin in her life. Sin
has no reality "in Science." Her "loyal students" would all have testified
that she was equal to any of the angels, if not better than the highest.
Yet a hard world around her, not understanding "true religion," began to
fancy, say in 1896, that she was not, every second, fulfilling all the ten
commandments. Then, besides her _War in Heaven_, the lady has written
another book, called _Christian Voices_, in which, the thought having been
long imputed to her, she asked the question, "Who shall succeed Mrs.
Eddy?" As _Science and Health_ declares there is no death, and as "Mother
Eddy" is specially immortal, St. Josephine's carnal talk of the "Christian
Science succession" was naturally regarded "in Science" as worse than
blasphemy. Thus many things worked together against St. Josephine
Woodbury, until at last she sat on "Mother" Eddy's burning fagots and wore
the crown of martyrdom.
Thereat the world did not come to an end, but went right on with the
production of quacks, dupes, and "loyal students."
CHAPTER XI.
METAPHYSICS.[55]
"Mother Eddy" and her flock "in Science" derive a considerable part of
their income from a glib use of the word "Metaphysics." But what the
"Church Scientist" has omitted to learn about the real import of that word
would make a volume even larger than _Science and Health_.
As unreservedly admitted in our present essay, there is no trouble about a
spiritual derivation of the universe. In the declaratory, religious form,
the New Testament is a sufficient example of this doctrine. In the
philosophical form the names of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom
resolved all things into the principle of "Mind," summarized the subject
for the ancient world. The modern world has now given three hundred years
to the same theme, and, however well or ill aware of the fact, has reached
the same end, but wholly without the assistance of any pushing, dodging
adventuress, with a little set of abstract ideas and much screaming of
"Science."
Leaving lighter themes for the moment, let us venture on a brief survey of
this ground.
There are just two possible ways of analyzing things. One way is to set
the world with its particulars before the eye, look at it, and accept what
we see. Then we may go to work on phenomena, dissecting and generalizing.
This is the way of physics--a road that _never_ leads to _meta_-physics.
It is the common turnpike of material science--of "positivism." In it
travel all such men, say, as Dr. Ernst Hæckel: also all such men as the
late Parson John Jasper, the colored preacher of Virginia, who, seeing the
sun move round the earth, settled the fact in that way.
The one other way of dissecting the universe is to examine the _means_
through which things are presented to us, and thus to ascertain what
effect the means may have in the production and nature of the things. This
method of investigation has ultimated in what has been summed up as
"Scientific Idealism."
Scientific idealism is the knowledge which every one may get even from his
first lessons in optics, that things of matter--the objects of our five
senses--are constituted such through the structure and action of these
senses themselves. That is to say, material things--whatever we see or
feel, hear, taste or smell--while existent and real--while practically
what every one takes them to be--are _made so_ through _relativity_. Or,
as Kant put it, every "phenomenon"--meaning every object or fact of
sensation--is a "_re_-presentation"; that is, some lot of effects on our
sensuous nature, bound together into a unity of them, the unity thus
formed becoming an object of awareness, a "percept."
Scientific idealism does not question the given duality of the cosmos,
which appears to us as what we call "mind and matter." Here are _we_; out
there, indubitably apart from us, are other things, involving another
source. But scientific idealism has found that this source is itself quite
other than the things we connect with it, and can properly be described in
this connection only as _source of impact_. It has nothing to do with
matter, in the common acceptation. It enters _into_ matter, being the
ultimate non-ego, the objective background, of every phenomenon. But, in
all material things, this background is _transformed_ by contact with
subjective sense (in us or other organisms), and "matter" is really the
fusion, the compound, the third term, of these two elemental principles.
This momentous truth, though mystically reached in the old tenet of India
that "matter is illusion," and though touched understandingly by Carneades
in Greece, was first clearly seen, in the manner of modern science, by the
remarkably solid Englishman, Thomas Hobbes.
"Qualities called sensible" [said Hobbes] "are, in the object that causeth
them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth our
organs diversely.... Because the image in vision, consisting of color and
shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that
sense, it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion, that the
same color and shape are the very qualities themselves."
But, concluded Hobbes:
"The subject wherein color and image are inherent is not the object or
thing seen.... There is nothing without us (really) which we call an image
or color.... The said image or color is but an apparition unto us of _the
motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain,
or spirits, or some internal substance of the head_.... As in vision, so
also in conceptions that arise from the other senses, the subject of their
inference is not the object, but the sentient."
When John Locke began his great "Essay" on _The Human Understanding_, and
posited mind in its first estate as a passive nonentity--a "blank
tablet"--he had no vital conception of scientific idealism. But, in the
patient thinking of twenty years, such a man could not fail to come upon
the law, though he saw it only in part, and did not work it out. This work
was carried a great way beyond him, by the acute and learned Bishop
Berkeley, who showed from practical science, especially through his
investigation of "vision," that nothing in the universe has any actual
being, apart from a universal element, that, wherever it may be posited,
can alone be called Mind.
Since Berkeley, no philosophical thinker, perhaps, of any significance,
anywhere in the world, has questioned the "ideality" of "material things."
Even Reid, as the philosopher of "common sense," declared that
"No man can conceive any sensation to resemble any known quality of
bodies. Nor can any man show, by any good argument, that all our
sensations might not have been as they are, though no body, nor quality of
body, had ever existed."
Hume's comprehension of Scientific idealism was complete to his day, and
was completely stated. He said:
"'Tis not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members, but
certain impressions which enter by the senses; so that the ascribing a
real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is
an act of the mind difficult to explain."
The idealism of recent "materialistic" philosophers, such as Herbert
Spencer and the school of "Positivists," has been most carefully expressed
by John Stuart Mill, in his statement that "Matter is a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation."
"If" [said Mr. Mill] "I am asked whether I believe in matter, I ask
whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I
believe in matter; and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this
I do not."
For an easy, popular view of the principle of scientific idealism, perhaps
nothing has been better said than by Thomas Carlyle, in his review of
Novalis.
"To a transcendentalist [says Carlyle] matter has an existence, but only
as a phenomenon. Were _we_ not there, neither would _it_ be there: it is a
mere relation, or rather the result of a relation between our living souls
and the great First Cause; and depends for its apparent qualities on our
bodily and mental organs; having itself no intrinsic qualities; being, in
the common sense of the word, nothing. The tree is green and hard, not of
its own natural virtue, but simply because my eye and my hand are
fashioned so as to discern such and such appearances under such and such
conditions. Nay, as an idealist might say, even on the most popular
grounds, _must_ it not be so? Bring a sentient being with eyes a little
different, fingers ten times harder than mine, and to him that thing which
I call tree shall be yellow and soft, as truly as to me it is green and
hard. Form the nervous structure in all points the reverse of mine, and
this same tree shall not be combustible and heat-producing, but dissoluble
and cold-producing; not high and convex, but deep and concave; shall
simply have _all_ properties exactly the reverse of those attributed to
it. There is no tree there; but only a manifestation of power from
something which is not _I_. The same is true of material nature at large,
of the whole visible universe, with all its movements, figures, accidents
and qualities."
Scientific idealism, as far as we have gone with it, has now become one of
the "_exact_" sciences--as much so as physics. It has been simply the
result of continuous and innumerable experiments in natural philosophy,
for three centuries. There is no need of going into these physical
particulars, after they have been put into the school-books of children
and explained in popular lectures. One more quotation must suffice. Mr. G.
H. Lewes, in his _Biographical History of Philosophy_, tells us that
"The radical error of those who believe that we perceive things _as they
are_, consists in mistaking a metaphor for a fact, and believing that the
mind is a mirror in which external objects are reflected. But, as Bacon
finely says, 'The human understanding is like an _unequal mirror_ to the
rays of things, which, _mixing its own nature with the nature of things,
distorts and perverts them_.' We attribute heat to fire, and color to the
flower, heat and color being states of our consciousness, occasioned by
the fire and the flower under certain conditions. Perception is nothing
more than a _state of the percipient_, a state of consciousness.... Of
every change in our sensation we are conscious, and in time we learn to
give definite names and forms to the causes of these changes. But in the
fact of consciousness there is nothing _beyond_ consciousness. In our
perceptions we are conscious only of the changes which have taken place
within us.... All we can do is to identify certain _external appearances_
with certain internal changes.... We conclude, therefore, that the world
_per se_ in nowise resembles the world as it appears to us. Perception is
an Effect; and its truth is not the truth of _resemblance_, but of
_relation_.... Light, color, sound, taste, are all states of
Consciousness; what they are beyond consciousness ... we cannot know, we
cannot imagine, because we can only conceive them _as_ we know them.
Light, with its myriad forms and colors--Sound, with its thousand-fold
life--make Nature what Nature appears to us. But they do not exist, _as
such_, apart from our consciousness; they are investitures with which we
clothe the world. Nature, in her insentient solitude is an eternal
Darkness--an eternal Silence."
CHAPTER XII.
FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE UNIVERSE.
In a previous chapter, some special reference has been made to a little
German professor named Immanuel Kant. He was born at Königsberg, in 1724.
In 1781 he wrote a book which he called "The Critique of Pure Reason."
This provokingly modest title, as already said, covered, in reality, _the
analysis of mind and matter, time and space_. It was the most far-reaching
piece of purely intellectual work that had ever been given to the world.
It has split the heads of hundreds of "philosophers." Certain thinkers
have fancied they have thought beyond it, and have supposed it to be laid
on the shelf of "deceased philosophy." Meanwhile, we are told, the
universities "are returning to the study of Kant." Better still, some of
them are even beginning to understand him. Here we shall take him
straight, paying no attention to any of the side issues in which he was
apt to cover himself up.[56]
Kant, so learned that he was said to "know everything," was completely
acquainted with the whole trend of British philosophy, from John Locke to
David Hume. He was saturated, too, with the physical sciences. So his
first real step in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ was to found himself on
the all-inclusive law of scientific idealism. Immanuel Kant did not fool
with this law. He did not test it, prove it, and then let it slip out of a
loose, greasy mind, as an airy nothing of no practical consequence. He
grasped it, and held it, as the bed-rock of all thought and all things. It
is a pity he omitted to say so at the very first touch of his work. But he
said it clearly enough when he happened to get ready. Thus, for
instance:[57]
"In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the
first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is
with respect to _the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in
general_. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing
but the re-presentation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite are
not in themselves the same as our re-presentations of them in intuition,
nor are their relations so constituted as they appear to us; and that _if
we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our
senses in general_, then _not only the nature and relations of objects_ in
space and time, _but even space and time themselves disappear_.... What
may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves, and
without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility, is quite unknown
to us."
Again, in closing his dissection of space, Kant said:
"Objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and _what we call outward
objects_ are nothing else but mere _re-presentations of our sensibility_,
whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not
known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting
which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made."
Once more:
"The faculty of sensibility not only does not present us with any
indistinct and confused cognition of objects as things in themselves, but,
in fact, gives us _no knowledge of these_ at all. On the contrary, as soon
as we abstract in thought _our own subjective nature_, the object
re-presented, with the properties ascribed to it by sensuous intuition,
_entirely disappears, because it was only this subjective nature that
determined the form of the object as a phenomenon_."
After awhile, under the maddening caption of "The Possibility of a
Conjunction of the Manifold Representations given by Sense,"[58] our
German professor virtually crowded his whole work into this one paragraph:
"The manifold content in our re-presentations can be given in an intuition
which is merely sensuous--in other words, is nothing but susceptibility;
and the form of this intuition can exist _a priori_ in our faculty of
representation, without being anything else but the mode in which the
subject is affected. But the conjunction (_conjunctio_) of a manifold in
intuition never can be given by the senses; it cannot therefore be
contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous
act of the faculty of re-presentation. And as we must, to distinguish it
from sensibility, entitle this faculty _understanding_, so all
conjunction, whether conscious or unconscious, be it of the manifold in
intuition, sensuous or non-sensuous, or of several conceptions, is an act
of the understanding. To this act we shall give the general appellation of
_synthesis_, thereby to indicate, at the same time, that _we cannot
represent anything as conjoined in the object without having previously
conjoined it ourselves_."
As to comprehend this paragraph is to analyze the universe, let us grapple
with it.
Impatient Dr. Sam. Johnson once kicked a stone to refute Berkeley. Let us
take that stone, as a clump of matter, and treat it with the head instead
of the foot.
"The manifold content in our re-presentations," says Kant, "can be given
in an intuition which is merely sensuous." This means simply that the
various properties of the "re-presentation" or "intuition" called a stone
are "effects on the senses." The color, the texture, the weight, the
size--every one of all such "material" attributes--exist, as they are,
solely by relation to _me_, or to some other being in whom is organized
the element of "sense." Matter is _made_ of impact--impact between its
objective background ("the noumenon" or "noumena") and some sort or degree
of subjectivity. Without these two terms, their product of interaction,
their third term, matter, is _not_. So "the manifold content" of a
"re-presentation"--or, what is the same thing, the properties of a
material object--are "nothing but susceptibility."
By "the form of intuition," Kant meant, as he has repeatedly explained,
the _plural quality_ of space and time. Space is made of _spaces_; time of
_times_; and the plural contents (always such) of matter can only exist
under the plural contents of space and time--that is, in sections of space
and sequences of time, these sections and sequences being the intrinsic
character, the divisible quality, the essential "form" of space and time
as total units or completed things. And the nature of space and time need
not be anything more _objective_ than the nature of matter in general, but
can be derived, too, from "the mode in which the subject is affected."
"But," says Kant, "_all conjunction_" is "an act of the understanding,"
and "can not be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition"; by
which he means that time could never be a conjunct of times, space a
conjunct of spaces, nor a stone the conjunct of its properties--each a
"synthesis" of a "manifold content"--unless made so by the synthetical
unity of _a priori_ mind.
Kant attributes "_unconscious_" action to the "_understanding_"--the
unconscious action of "conjunction" or "synthesis." His phrase has been a
perpetual stumbling-block to his readers, but he meant exactly what he
said. Unconscious mental synthesis is what he afterward designated as "the
synthesis of _apprehension_."
"By the term _synthesis_ of apprehension [said he], I understand the
combination of the manifold in an empirical intuition, whereby perception,
that is, empirical consciousness of the intuition (as phenomenon), is
possible."
Kant talks of "making the empirical intuition of a house into a
perception, by apprehension of the manifold contained therein," and says
that "the _necessary unity of space_ and of my _external sensuous
intuition_ lies at the foundation of this act." The "manifold" contained
in an "empirical intuition"--take the stone we have used for an
example--is simply the diversity of "properties," constituting the
object--the color, texture, size, weight, and the rest of them; and these
properties are "effects of sense." Every one of them is a relation to
subjectivity, a result of impact _on_ subjectivity, and is in the _object_
only as reflecting or _re_-presenting there the sensuous nature of a
_subject_. But these various "effects on various senses," these merely
subjective separates--how do they _get united_ into _one thing_? What
constitutes the unity of sensuous manifolds? Every phenomenon being an
essential plurality--a lot of "sense-effects"--what closes together the
various effects on various human senses, called the properties of a stone,
into the one phenomenal object, the stone itself. To this end there must
be some common subjective ground of those subjective things, "effects on
sense." There must be some subjective unity in which those subjective
pluralities all merge, for only as _merged_ do they get to be an _object_.
Now, a common subjective ground of various effects on various senses can
only be a common _awareness of them_--a _synthetical unity of
apprehension_, or just instinctive, automatic consciousness in the germ.
This must be common to all the senses together, and to each sense
separately. What, for example, is seeing, but the simple awareness of
sight? What is touch, but the simple awareness of feeling? What is any
"intuition," which means any taking-in of any phenomenon, but a common
awareness, however rudimental or developed, of some conjoined diversity of
effects on sense?
It must be added here, as vital to the full comprehension of the genesis
of matter, that not only every material object, like our example, the
stone, is made of essential plurality of sense-effects, but that _every
separate property_ of an object is also made of like plurality. No object,
and no property of an object, is, or can be, single, unal, or, in other
words, _anything_, until constructed so, in sense, by the "unconscious
understanding" thereof--the synthetical unity of instinctive, automatic
"apprehension." To realize this fact, it is only necessary to remember
that every property of anything, say the hardness of a stone, is a
compound relation between the impact of some ultimate non-ego on the sense
of touch, and the peculiar nature of the sense itself: so the property of
hardness must contain _essential diversity_, something from each of _two
fundamental sources_. As Aristotle, from his ontological investigations,
found that matter, if regarded as an absolute independence--an unrelated
thing in itself--is _no thing_, but only chaotic
indeterminateness--formless "potentiality"--so Kant, from his
psychological inquiry--his dissection of phenomena as existent through
perception--found the same truth in deeper significance. The _entire
principle of unity_, Whether in a feeling, a thought, a material object,
or the universe as a whole, _can only exist through the principle of
mind_.
Here is the very bottom of the discoveries of Kant, and the basis, also,
of all things.
Mind, then, in its lowest state, is what Kant, "to distinguish it from
sensibility," entitled "unconscious understanding." There used to be an
old saw in philosophy--still, indeed, at work--to the effect that "there
is nothing in the mind that was not first in sense." Leibnitz, adding a
piece to the saw, said: "Except mind itself." Leibnitz affirmed, that is,
that sense always _contains_ mind--that mind is _in_ sense as a component
of it, and that without mind there is no sense at all. What Leibnitz
perceived and asserted, Kant _proved_ by "observation and induction"--by
analyzing phenomena under the law of scientific idealism. Mind in
sense--the mind of sense--is just _automatic animal awareness_, just
"simple apprehension," undeveloped, and in the lowest animal life not to
be developed, into "apperception," the _conscious_ stage of understanding,
capable of forming a _concept_.
Well, in the genesis of a stone, or any other material object, certain
effects on sense are merged in the unit they compose, by reception into
the "synthetical unity of apprehension." The stone is _created_ in this
way. Its own objective unity--its wholeness, or "_form_" as a stone--is
thus the derivation, the manufactured product, of _subjectivity as a
cosmic element_, an element "_a priori_" to the existence of any possible
phenomenon.
The stone, however, _is_ unmistakably objective--is just the palpable
thing that everybody takes it to be, out there in space. This is a given
_fact of perception_--something, as Kant said, "never questioned in
experience." As such _fact_, how can it be accounted for, when we know, at
the same time, that the stone is nothing but a plexus of subjective
states? How does the bunch of _internal impressions_ get _externalized_?
What is the cause of this reflex, this "_re_-presentation"? It must be
something inherent in the principle of _apprehension itself_, or the
plexus of impressions would necessarily stay within us. Being wrought
internally, it would remain internal. Hence, this "apprehension"--this
element of instinctive synthetical awareness--must be in its nature a
_double_--an entity which reproduces, or throws out before itself,
whatever lot of sense-effects it receptively synthesizes, or binds
together in a sheaf, known as some object. But all this, summed up, means
only that mind, even in its lowest form of "unconscious
understanding"--the simple automatic apprehension which shuts together
certain effects on sense into a totality of them--must, _as being
apprehension_, necessarily, though instinctively, apprehended its own
product. Here is the full explanation of the amusing, iron-clad conception
of Hobbes, that an "image," or a "color," is but an apparition unto us of
"motion, agitation, or alteration" in some "internal substance of the
head."
The self-reflexiveness of "apprehension" is precisely the same thing, _in
germ_, that the self-reflexiveness of "apperception" is, in _full
self-consciousness_.
The self-reflexiveness of apprehension, in the manufacture of phenomena,
was named by Kant "_the transcendental synthesis of imagination_"--the
word "imagination" standing on its roots, and meaning _the image-making
faculty_. Phenomena, as reflex-conjuncts of sense-effects, are
"produced"--put out--by this second function of apprehension; so Kant said
he sometimes called it "productive imagination." It is that function of
pure elemental, or _a priori_ awareness, which "_re_-presents" itself in
the constitution of every object, as its _unity_, but a unity _shaped_
according to some object's filling of senses-effects. Hence Kant says:
"This synthesis of the manifold of sensuous intuition, which is possible
and necessary _a priori_, may be called figurative synthesis (_synthesis
speciosa_)."
Thus Kant found mind in sense, "unconscious understanding," the
instinctive awareness of animal susceptibility, as it existed in himself,
to be the literal objective basis of all phenomena--the first "material"
unity of every "material thing." And he found this elemental source of all
unity to be an innate self-activity--a self-seeing mirror, as it were--a
double of receptiveness and reflectiveness. Here, at last, was the actual,
_living thing_, of which Locke's "blank-tablet" had long been the
still-born, stone figure.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his remarkable investigation of "The Principles of
Psychology," posits "mind" as always implied in sentiency, and as
necessary to the genesis of any phenomenon, even the "first nervous shock"
of a sensitive being. Recognizing the law of scientific idealism, he has
seen, too, that our objective world is made up, at the perceptional
outset, of such shocks. Again, he has proved, with great detail, that the
action of mind is always of one general nature, whether in the lowest
animal instinct or the highest conscious reason. But back at the first
nervous shock, Mr. Spencer _stops_ with mind, and says that at the next
regress it becomes "unknowable." Yet nearly a hundred years before this
investigation Kant showed precisely what this so-called "unknowable" _is_.
He showed that mind, in all stages and states--mind in itself--is a
synthetical unity of awareness. In germ, as "unconscious
understanding"--as the mind of sense--its function is to be simply
apprehensive of, and thus to conjoin in its instinctive cognizance, some
"manifold" contained in a "nervous shock," or in various sense-effects,
into some _unity_; which then, as _itself apprehended_, or _made a
reflex_, becomes an impression, an image, an object.
CHAPTER XIII.
A SPECIAL LOOK AT SPACE AND TIME.
Through scientific idealism, fully examined, Kant proved that matter is a
manufacture of sense. We have not followed the order of his work, but have
gone straight to the heart of it. His own beginning was the dissection of
space and time. Still, he implied therein, if only in one remark, all that
has here been stated.
"If I take [says Kant] from our representation of a body, all that the
understanding thinks as belonging to it, as substance, force,
divisibility, and also whatever belongs to sensation, as impenetrability,
hardness, color, there is still something left us from this empirical
intuition, namely _extension and shape_. These belong to pure intuition,
which exists _a priori_ in the mind, as a mere form of sensibility, and
without any real object of the senses or any sensation."
Students of Kant have known, in a general way, that he attributed
"extension" to "bodies," as derived by them from _a priori_ mind. _Space_
is so derived; hence all things _in_ space, which is the "form," the
"condition" of their existence, must partake of its nature, which is pure
extension, pure "given quantity," as he designates it. But why does the
_shape_ of a material body belong to "pure intuition," and _come from
mind_? Simply because the shape (let it be of a stone) is merely the
_objected_ "_synthesis of apprehension_," in which the properties of the
stone, as impressions of sense, are _unified_, but in accordance with
their special variety. The shape is their "figurative synthesis," their
"_synthesis speciosa_." Now, in the meaning of Kant, and in the nature of
the case, space is _made_ in precisely the same _manner_ as a stone; only
the stone is full of diverse properties--special effects on sense, got
from some impinging background of matter--some "noumenon"--while space has
no properties at all, except additions and divisions of _itself_--spaces.
In other words, the stone is a _special_ relation between mental synthesis
and sensuous susceptibility, the latter being in particular impact with
some noumenal non-ego, and being definitely _filled_ from it. Space, on
the other hand, is a _general_ relation between the same mental synthesis
and the same sensuous susceptibility, the latter holding _no contents_
from any noumenon, yet being recipient to _all_ possibility of noumenal
impact. Hence, space is just "the synthesis of apprehension" itself, set
in self-reflex, objected, phenomenated. The stone, in its unity, its form,
its "shape," is this objected synthesis of apprehension, _filled_ with
certain sensuous effects. The synthesis of apprehension, again, as the
condition of any special "shape" into which it may be stuffed, is of
course _a priori_ to _the_ stuffed shape; so space is _a priori_ to the
stone in space. Once again, space is the outward representation, the very
double to the eye, of the synthesis of apprehension; for space is just the
_visible synthesis of the apprehended_--the transparent base of
co-existence for all external things.
It must be remembered that the synthesis of apprehension, as the "mind" of
"sense," is itself a _double_, containing the pure conjunctive unity of
"unconscious understanding" as an active factor, and susceptibility to
impact as a passive factor. In the conjoined relation of these two factors
every material phenomenon gets to exist; so there must be _some_ relation
of space to _every_ external object, and to _all_ external objects--which
is to say at once that space is _infinite_, both in extent and
divisibility, so far as it can apply to objects _at all_.
And here, too, is the reason that the contained character, the constituent
quality, of space--meaning what Kant termed the "form of the
intuition"--is essentially plural. This constituent quality of space is a
_re_-presentation of mind, as at once active and passive, receptive and
reflexive--as fundamental _a priori_ self-separateness. But _space
itself_, as a _whole_, is the _synthesis_ of this self-separateness. It is
self-unity of self-separateness, _materialized_. Space, made of spaces, is
a thing identical in form and contents. Kant said:
"Space _re_-presented as an _object_ (as geometry really requires it to
be) contains more than the mere _form of the intuition_; namely, a
combination of the manifold given according to the form of sensibility
into a representation that can be intuited; so the _form of the
intuition_ gives us merely the manifold, but the _formal intuition_ gives
unity of re-presentation. In the 'Æsthetic,' [the first division of _The
Critique of Pure Reason_], I regarded this unity as belonging entirely to
sensibility, for the purpose of indicating that it antecedes all
conceptions, although it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to
sense, through which, however, all our conceptions of space and time are
possible.... By means of this unity alone (the understanding determining
the sensibility) space and time are given as intuitions."
It is easy enough to follow out the genesis of time, in the same way as
the genesis of space. The constituent quality of space and time is the
same in both, and is subject in both to the same act of synthesis, in
order that the essential plurality of "the form of intuition" may be
created into the unity of "the formal intuition" itself--the single thing,
space or time. But time is the "form" of "_in_-ternal sense," as Kant put
it, while space is the "form" of "_ex_-ternal sense"--sense being to Kant
not its physical organs (which are matter), but mental _susceptibility_ as
distinguished from mental _synthesis_. Every phenomenon in space is made
of active subjective-synthesis, passive subjective-susceptibility, and
noumenal impact. Space and time themselves are made of the synthesis and
the susceptibility alone. But pure synthesis, which means just pure
identity of awareness, can _have_ no "susceptibility," cannot be
_occupied_, without _change of state_; and any change of state in a pure
general awareness forms succession of states, or, as Kant said,
"_generates time_." But conjunction, again, of synthesis and
susceptibility must be the relating of separates, with reference to the
objective as well as the subjective factor. As objective effect this
relation is pure co-existence of separates in time, through outness from
each other--space. All objects, impressions, "effects of sense," must take
the order of time; but "objects of internal sense" (feelings, or
emotions), having no direct filling from noumena, are not objects in
space. Thus, while space is pure synthesis of apprehension _ex_-ternally
objected, time is the same pure synthesis of apprehension _in_-ternally
objected.
CHAPTER XIV.
CREATIVE MIND FURTHER PROBED.
The inmost secret of the universe lies in Kant's four words, "the
synthesis of apprehension," or what he more elaborately termed "the
transcendental synthesis of the image-making faculty."
"It is an operation [he says] of the understanding on sensibility, and the
_first_ application of the understanding to objects of possible intuition,
and at the same time _the basis for the exercise of the other functions of
that faculty_."
It has been intently presented to view in these pages, because it
focalises and explains the whole law of scientific idealism, and is the
one most important as well as abstruse fact in the genesis of things.
But having duly dealt with this point, it must now be said that "the
synthesis of apprehension," _alone_ and _ungrown_, is altogether
inadequate to give form to an object, in the full import of that word. For
an _object_ is something held distinct by itself, in connection with
another object, or with various objects. "_Unconscious_ understanding"
cannot form such connection and distinction, but can only blindly
manufacture single intuitions, affording at most what Kant termed "a
rhapsody of perceptions," in which no one would be first or last, or
anything at all when past. A fish-worm, perhaps, has such a "rhapsody of
perceptions" for its objective world. In the world of man the _a priori_
element of intelligence which shapes it must be objected in the phase of
consciousness proper, or "apperception," as well as "simple apprehension."
In noting the difference between the synthesis of apprehension and the
synthesis of apperception, Kant said:
"It is one and the same spontaneity which, at one time under the name of
imagination, at another under that of understanding, produces conjunction
in the manifold of intuition."
"Apperception" is simply apprehension _apprehended_, or mind adequate to
self-conception and so to conceptions in general. That there can be a
stone, as known to a _human being_, there must be a synthesis of
sense-effects (its properties), in which they are distinguished among
themselves, and of which objects as wholes are distinguished from each
other. A synthesis of this kind presupposes not merely "unconscious
understanding," but understanding that recognizes _itself_ in connecting
all things else.
"I am conscious [said Kant] of my identical self in relation to all the
variety of representations given to me in intuition, because I call all of
them _my_ representations.... The thought, 'These representations, given
in intuition, belong all of them to me,' is just the same as 'I unite them
in one self-conscious.'... Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuition,
as given _a priori_, is therefore the foundation of the identity of
apperception itself, which antecedes _a priori_ all determinate thought.
But the conjunction of representations into a conception is not to be
found in objects themselves ... but is on the contrary, an operation of
the understanding itself, which is nothing more than the faculty of
conjoining _a priori_, and of bringing the variety of given
representations under the unity of apperception. This principle is the
highest in all human cognition."
So, to the _existence_ of any _distinguishable object_, there must
_pre-exist_ the element of mind in the phase of _self_-consciousness as
well as _sub_-consciousness. Both must enter the object. Hence, when Kant
talked of "_the objective unity of self-consciousness_"--another of his
profoundest deductions--he meant literally that "the synthetical unity of
apperception," as well as "the synthetical unity of apprehension," is
_materialized_ in all _conceivable things_. To form the sense-effects of a
stone into a single "intuition," they must be merged in a synthesis of
apprehension; but to _set_ the intuition as thus created--to make it
remain _itself_ in the midst of _others_, it must be merged with them in a
higher synthesis--a common connective consciousness, which, distinguishing
them in itself, re-presents them as distinguished.
It was here that Kant reached his famous "_Categories_," which are merely
reflexes of the pure synthetical unity of mind, as forming the unity of
all things and of all connection among them.
The principle of mind, beginning, as we have seen, even with the
instinctive mind of sense, is a spontaneous self-activity, receptive,
reflexive, and resumptive of its doubles. By being the first, it unifies
any and every manifold of sense-effects; by being the second, it
_re_-presents the product--throws it _out_; by being the third, it
apprehends the externalisation, and a percept is born. Apperception, or
full consciousness, is the same self-activity, self-reflex, self-sight,
transformed into "understanding." Thus, mind is essentially a _triad_ as
well as a _unit_. But, if so, it must reflect itself to conception as a
"_Quantity_"--a sum of its own phases; and in these phases, it is a
"Unity," a "_Plurality_," and a "_Totality_."
Mind, again, as just _a-priori_ principle and basis of all things, is
manifestly their universal "Quality." But, as self-reflexive,
self-resumptive, it is at once a "_Reality_," a "_Negation_," and a
"_Limitation_," which means it is that which, in its double, contraposes
one state to another, while, as a whole, it is the limit of both states.
It goes without saying that a principle of self-reflex is the "Relation"
of its reflexes, and in this relation is a "_Substance_ with
_Dependence_," a "_Cause_ with _Effect_," and a "_Reciprocity_" of its
separates.
This is a very short cut to the Kantian Categories, but sufficient,
perhaps, if we bear in mind that, while _implicit_ in the mind of sense,
they are reflexes of conscious, not "unconscious" understanding. The
synthesis of mind through conceptions proceeds, not by the formation of
sense-effects into units of intuition, but by the formation of these
already-made units (objects or their properties) into species, genera, and
ultimate universals--the pure unity of these groupings, without regard to
the things grouped, being just the pure _a priori_ unity of self-conscious
awareness. Thus, those ultimate universals, the categories, are objective
reproductions of pure conceptive synthesis, without which there could be
_no connection of things in thought_--which would amount precisely to no
_realised objects_ and no _objective experience_.
One of Kant's industrious reviewers, Sir William Hamilton, fancied that
Aristotle's categories were "genera of real things," while Kant's
categories were "determinations of thought," and, as mere "_entia
rationis_," must "be excluded from the Aristotelic list." But there are no
"genera of real things" except _as_ "determinations of thought"; and, in
making an experimental classification of objects, Aristotle found some of
the Kantian categories, because the synthetical unity of mind had put
those categories into the objects at the creation of them. To Kant an
_object_ meant something of which Sir William Hamilton had no boding.
CHAPTER XV.
THE GENESIS OF "TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS."
It must now be easy to see that mind, in its general form, is
three-in-one--a triad. It is a self-reflexive, self-related unit, of three
phases. The first phase is automatic "apprehension." The second is
conscious "understanding." The third, which we touch here, is "reason." In
reason, mind is still the general cosmic principle of awareness, with the
function of synthesis, or conjunction. As intuition, it has perceived
things. As conception, it has classified them. As a last synthetical unity
of awareness, it must include, or "comprehend" them--must relate them to
its conjunctive unity in their full scope, which means simply in the
ultimate reflexes, or forms, of its own nature and action. As process,
this can only be done by referring all things to pure synthesis, or
connective identity, as _final cause_.
_Seeing_ things, and then _thinking_ them, we always end by asking,
"_Why?_" They _are_, each and all so and so; but what is the "_reason_"
for it? The pure _form_ of answer, apart from all contents, is
"_because_"--on account of _cause_. Thus reason forms its synthesis of
comprehension by referring the particular to the general for a cause--a
process that can never stop short of including all things in ultimate
unities of cause. It is evident that ultimate unities of cause must
contain all subordinate causes or conditions under them. There can be just
three such ultimate unities; for there are just three possible kinds of
being and conditions that relate to their universals: subjective being and
conditions to subjective unity of them; objective being and conditions to
objective unity of them; and all being and conditions, both subjective and
objective, to the universal unity of being and conditions. These final
unities, again, _as_ final--as totalities of conditions with none
beyond--are themselves "unconditioned."
Reason, then, as an _a-priori_ synthetical unity, necessarily refers all
conditions of things to their final or absolute unities, which are in
reality nothing but conceptional reflexes of Reason's _own constructive_
synthetical identity. To _be_ an identity of mind, for instance, to the
conditions of subjectivity, reason must receive _them_ into _its_ unity,
which thus becomes _their_ totality. Now what is the objective
re-presentation, the rational conception of the totality of subjective
conditions? It is simply the "transcendental idea" of pure subjectiveness,
or Soul. In the same way the totality of objective phenomenal conditions,
is the idea of the Universe; while the totality of _all_ conditions, both
subjective and objective, is the idea of that in which all mind and all
matter are related as their final cause or reason--God.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE GRAND RESULT OF DISSECTING PHENOMENA.
Since the days of Immanuel Kant, no philosophy, no rational theology, no
ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any
real basis in thought--the reason being that he saw through, and
explained, the principle of universal relativity, the law of scientific
idealism, and relaid the whole structure, from the corner-stone up.
Before Kant it was known well enough that "matter," however we must all
accept it with our hands and eyes, has no standing, under the analysis of
thought, except as a system of effects on ourselves. Hume, we remember,
saw all this so clearly that he pronounced the very organs of sense, "our
limbs and members," to be "not our body," but "certain impressions" to
which the mind ascribes "a corporeal existence." Our limbs and members
certainly _are_ our body--the only body we have--but Hume was right in his
meaning that our body is a phenomenon which has no existence but as a
plexus of impressions on a principle of intelligence, possessing various
modes of reception, named senses. But this _principle_ of _intelligence_
itself was, to Hume, not a fact to be grasped by "reason," not a principle
to be known and described, but was to be taken as a "force and vivacity"
unknowable beyond an _instinct_ of it. Hume's unknowable "force and
vivacity"--an improved form of Locke's "blank-tablet"--Kant _analyzed_ in
the light of its products; namely, those conjuncts of sense-effects called
objects; those conjuncts of objects called species, genera, and
categories; and finally those conjuncts of all things and all conditions
of things, called transcendental ideas. Now, such conjuncts of various
"manifolds" actually exist. They are man's percepts and concepts; they are
his facts, his environment. But _as_ percepts and concepts, and always
conjuncts of "the manifold," they are formed, organized, totalized,
through a _principle_--the principle of perception and conception itself.
This is Kant's _a-priori_ synthetical unit, common and necessary to all
"things" and to all "experience."
The last word of any weight, against this reduction of matter to mind, was
said a few years ago by that exceptionally acute thinker, Professor
Huxley, in his summary of Hume. Too able and learned, both as philosopher
and scientist, to question idealism, Huxley admitted it unqualifiedly.
But, not having gone beyond the British proofs of it, he defended what is
commonly called "materialism" in this way:
"If we analyze the proposition that all mental phenomena are the effects
or products of material phenomena, all that it means amounts to this: that
whenever those states of consciousness which we call sensation, or
emotion, or thought, come into existence, complete investigation will show
good reason for the belief that they are preceded by those other phenomena
of consciousness to which we give the names of matter and motion. All
material changes appear, in the long run, to be modes of motion; but our
knowledge of motion is nothing but that of a change in the place and order
of our sensations; just as our knowledge of matter is restricted to those
feelings of which we assume it to be the cause."
To this last posture of materialism, a competent understanding of Kant is
the _only reply that has ever been needed_. It is simply of no consequence
to the case what states of consciousness precede or follow other states of
consciousness. Let it be granted (whether true or not) that "phenomena of
consciousness to which we give the names of matter and motion" precede all
others. What of it? Kant has proved to us that _no_ phenomenon of
consciousness--no matter, no motion, no sensation--and, beyond all these,
no time and no space, in which all the rest appear--has, or can have, _any
existence_, except as put into unity, form, and order, by the unity, form,
and order of mind. If both "the synthesis of apprehension" and "the
synthesis of apperception" enter into any state of consciousness named
matter, _to give it birth_, there is no possibility that the element of
intelligence can be an _after-birth_ of the process.
All our objects, then, from a germ cell to the horizon, are constructed
such through a mental principle innate in our own structure. But here it
must be re-iterated and re-emphasized that whatever we, as units of mind,
may embody in objects as _form_, the _filling_ of them is not ours. It
has a source apart. The filling of our objects comes from "the ultimate
non-ego," the "background of matter." This ultimate non-ego was a heritage
to Kant from British idealism. He took it for granted at his first step
and held by it unchanged when he was old and exhausted. He called it the
"noumenon," the "real correlate of matter," and pluralized it as "things
in themselves." But he insisted, as firmly as Herbert Spencer has since
done, that the "noumenon" is "unknown and unknowable."
In a certain way--vital enough, too--"things in themselves" _are_ "unknown
and unknowable." Man is a small, dependent, limited being. Let us admit at
once every old proverb in the world, to the effect that "the finite cannot
comprehend the infinite." Sir William Hamilton issued a tedious list of
such proverbs. Let us adopt the whole of it. "The finite cannot comprehend
the infinite." The very meaning of "things in themselves" is that they are
withheld from us in their _specific contents_. But in their _general
nature_ they are related and revealed to us; and the revelation is always
asserted when we name them "source of impact," the "real correlate of
matter," "things in themselves," or even "the unknown and unknowable." Is
there an "unknown and unknowable?" Yes, there _is_. But whatever _is_ has
_being_--_must_ have being, or not be that which "is." So much then we
_know_ of "the unknown and unknowable"; it has being; it is a _fact_. But
we know it negatively, as well as positively. We know what it is _not_, on
precisely the same ground that we know what it _is_. Being a "noumenon,"
it is _not_ a phenomenon; being a "thing in _itself_," it is not what
things are to _us_. Being "the real correlate of matter," it is _not_
matter, but is the objective background of matter.
But _now_: Kant had analyzed matter and found it to be a _relation_--a
relation between finite subjective awareness and this very noumenal
background now in evidence. He had found, too, that all _matter_--every
spicule of it--is _exhausted in the relation_. He had found that, out of
the relation, _matter has no existence_. By these presents, then, we know
that the objective background of matter, the ultimate non-ego, is _not
material_.
And, at this point, where are we, if we pause and think? When reduced to
elements, to principles, what is there of the universe--the all of things?
Just the subjective and the objective, mind and matter. Hence, that which
is _not matter_ is _mind_. Nothing else is left for it.
We may wriggle at this terminus as much as we like, but there is no
dodging it. It may be said, for instance, that, while we _know_ and
_experience_ nothing but mind and matter (including with matter its
phenomenal vistas, space and time), we can _imagine something_ else than
either; and, during the past fifty years, this nonsense has found lodgment
in some heads. Now I can imagine _anything_, in the meaning that I can
arbitrarily produce some foolish _fancy_. I can imagine a white blackbird,
with his tail-feathers on his head. But I cannot imagine even this
self-evident contradiction as a thing of neither mind nor matter. What is
an object of "imagination" in the meaning of fancy? It may be empty of
matter, and so unlike the white blackbird. But _no_ object of imagination
can be empty of mind. Imagination is itself an act of mind; hence every
possible product of imagination must partake of mind. If, therefore, I
imagine something apart from mind and matter, it must still spring from
mind, contain mind, and so _not_ be apart from mind. The "_reductio ad
absurdum_" can be had cheap and sure, just where it is most needed.
After Immanuel Kant had once and for good dissected the universe, it seems
a pity that he declined to put his findings together, and take the last
logical step of his magnificent demonstrations. As a requisite, perhaps,
to his microscopic analysis of human subjectivity, he declined to
generalize his own discoveries. In short, Kant's synthesis was Hegel. But
Hegel we need not follow, as our short cut to him, through the solution of
noumena, is worth more, as yet, than the whole German tour of
"post-Kantean philosophy."
Very early in his work Kant said:
"There are two sources of human knowledge (which probably spring from _a
common, but to us unknown root_), namely, sense and understanding. By the
former, objects are _given_ to us; by the latter, _thought_."
Dissecting, with Kant, the nature of "understanding," we have discovered
in it the unal form of all our re-presentations--of every perceptible and
conceivable objected fact. Dissecting "sense," with the same instructor,
we have found it to be certain modes of mental susceptibility, its
physical organs being nothing but relations between susceptible awareness
and the noumenal unknown, like all the rest of "matter." Led, once more,
by our Professor straight up to this noumenal unknown, where _he_ willed
to stop and turn his back on it, we have only had to _look_, in order to
see it collapse into the self-retention of Spirit--spirit _out_ of _us_,
but still _in itself_, and thus going to make up the totality of Spiritual
Being. We have thus found the "one common root" of all knowledge and all
things. But we have touched, also, the apex of thought, and can now see
what is meant--really and fully meant--by "_absolute idealism_."
Absolute Idealism is not merely a phrase; it is a grand and glorious fact.
Immersed in matter, stuck in our senses, we may insist on looking at
sensuous phenomena as our friend John Jasper looked at the sun, with
honest contempt for Copernicus and Newton. "De earf do _not_ move roun' de
sun," exclaimed the sturdy preacher, "but de bressed sun move roun' de
earf. Dere she go now: don't I see her wi' dese very eyes?" Parson Jasper
did see the sun moving round the earth, and in the same way we all see the
objects of our senses existing in perfect independence of ourselves.
Still, as surely as astronomy has proved the delusion of taking the sun's
movement from the eye, philosophy, with the aid of "practical science,"
has proved the delusion of taking objective re-presentations as not
constructed through subjective being. The inevitable end of this proof is
the dissolution of noumena as anything "material," and the inclusion of
all things in Universal Spirit. Of such spirit, finite subjectivity is a
function--a necessary participative reflex, through which the Universal
Spirit is life, manifestation, self-evolution.
CHAPTER XVII.
SOME SEQUENCES OF ABSOLUTE IDEALISM.
Since Kant, we have said, "no philosophy, no rational theology, no
ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any
real basis in thought." It must be added that since the fulfilment of
Kant's _Critique_, especially by Hegel, there has not been one stone left
as a foundation for "materialism." It goes right on, however, in
multifarious forms, its defunct exponents still imagining they live.
Surgical psychology, in special, is still as active with scalpel and
microscope as if ours were the day of Coudillac and Erasmus Darwin. The
knife goes into the brain, and the eye peers after it, with the funny
expectation of seeing, with Dr. Cabanis, some spicule or plexus of matter,
there, "which secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." The work is
excellent as anatomy, and may have a plenty of important uses. But we,
here, if we have had the capacity and patience to grasp the findings of
Immanuel Kant, know that mind can never be derived from any physical
correspondence of its nature and action. We know that every possible
attempt at such derivation is merely a side-show of Parson Jasper's great
astronomical comedy, which Copernicus exploded four hundred years ago. We
know that every fiber, every solid or liquid, of the brain, with every
movement of every atom it contains, is a ready-made physical object in a
ready-made space and a ready-made time. But if we know Kant, we know,
without a misgiving, that space and time, with all things in them, are not
only dependencies but are literal creations and manufactures of a
universal principle named _mind_. We know it is this principle which
furnishes the form, the unity, and so the very existence of every
phenomenon. Hence we know, finally, that the first step in the
understanding of matter is the analysis of mind, through which all matter
_is_ and is _constructed_. Without this first step, all other steps are
simply a stumble in the dark--the blind-man's buff of children. Or we may
say, with a little more dignity, perhaps, that every material law of the
cosmos is subject to "The Law of Scientific Idealism."
Now scientific idealism, pursued to the end, merges in absolute idealism.
The source and substance of the universe is Intelligent Spirit; or, as the
Bible and its Theologians say, this is the All-In-All.
For fifty years--from the publication of Kant's _Critique_ in 1781, along
through Fichte, and Schelling, to the death of Hegel in 1831--the vast
illumination of thought that has been summed up as "German
Transcendentalism" strove to unify natural theology and practical science
in "Absolute Idealism." It will yet be seen that the work was done,
however ill-comprehended. The good old Kant still had his whole head with
him when he said, in 1787, "the danger, in this case, is not that of being
refuted, but of being misunderstood." The Comtes, the Hamiltons, the Mills
and Spencers--with no end, too, of their German brothers--are illustrious
examples in proof of Kant's remark, however greatly they may be respected
within the limits of their own work.
Once and for good, the history of philosophy, when understood, and the
history of science, when understood, have joined in the proof that the
principle of all life--we may say God if we like--is Spirit Principle.
Transcendentalism--a bulky word, but covering much more than the letter of
it--was naturally too high and too deep a result to get all at once into
the average human head. For thirty-odd years after the close of its epoch
in Germany--or until, in 1864, Dr. James Hutchison Stirling produced his
_Secret of Hegel_--not a man stood on the earth adequate to reproduce
transcendentalism in basis and system. But the practical gist of it,
without the full center or circumference, gradually became a part of the
world's literature. In Britain, most notably through Thomas Carlyle, the
new light penetrated biography, history, criticism, and even political
disquisition. In America, focused in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the same light,
whiter and purer if less flaming and burning, both vivified and purified
all things on which it was shed. There the Infinite Oversoul and the
finite undersoul seemed once again to meet in communion and evolution.
Meanwhile, Theodore Parker, with his vast scholarship and overpowering
courage, preached Jesus of Nazareth, the Sermon on the Mount, and the
Golden Rule, with little regard for any organized theology of his day,
whether its Unitarianism or its Calvinistic Orthodoxy. Back of all this,
as now appears, there was a plain, uncultured, but inquiring and
thoughtful man, in the byways of New England, who from the mechanism of
clocks turned to the workings of the human mind, and in his own way
reached the depth of knowledge and the mysteries of life. From a few
practical experiments, he, too, analyzed the things of matter, and found
them to be re-presentations, externalizations, of elemental spirit. And
then he drew the inference that spirit molds, directs, governs matter, and
so that health of mind materializes health of body.
But now, at once, the whole question at issue confronts us--what is the
true and full position and power _of mind in therapeutics_? This question
must be answered, here, not from the Quimby standpoint, and much less from
that of the shallow muddle termed Christian Science, but from the
standpoint of actual, accredited, established metaphysics, now
substantially bearing the concensus of religion, philosophy, and the
practical investigation of material phenomena.
By aid of Kant, with our short-cut to the logical and necessary end of his
achievement, we have grasped the elemental source and solvent of man and
his universe. It is Spirit in its evolution. But, in this evolution,
man--or say rather and always _the principle of sensation and
consciousness in which man inheres_--is merely the general form, diversely
individualized, of the One All-Inclusive Spirit in the activity of
self-manifestation. The earth, the sun, moon, and stars, the human body,
its house and the landscape, with every particle of all of them, are
outwoven of universal Spirit through the loom of subjective being and
unity. The forms of matter, with no exception, are fabricated in this way.
Thus, not figuratively, but literally and with exact knowledge, we may
repeat after St. John:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything
made that was made."
But the principle of animal apprehension and human apperception--or say
just the conscious and the sub-conscious--is not the Ultimately Creative
One, but is, in _us_, only a sub-creative power and agency. We simply
individualize it in endless degrees and variations, all of us framing the
same general world of objects, conceptions and feelings, but no one of us
being, seeing, or feeling, in all respects, exactly like any other
incarnation of our common identity.
But while the _form_--the unity, and thus the individuality--of all
things, is materialized from Spirit through sensation and consciousness in
subjectivity--while this is the secret and genesis of all creation--we
must ever hold fast to the equally basic and universal fact that the
_filling_ of the form--the infinite variety of impact on subjectivity
which furnishes the diversity of objects--all this comes from that
ultimate spirit-background crudely called "the unknown and unknowable."
Now this background of Absolute Spirit, the very withholding of which from
finite creatures constitutes them such, institutes their law of progress,
and gives movement of expression to the Infinite Itself, can only be
absorbed and mastered by human beings through study, work, and
experience. While genuine metaphysics, then, assures us of our
spirit-origin and relative oneness with God--of being God's children far
more directly and intimately than most of us have ever imagined--it
teaches us that for practical purposes, in our condition of existence
called "matter," it makes no difference _what_ we _call_ this condition.
'Tis something actual, something definite, something _fixed_, just as long
as we are in our earthly relation to it. From this point of view, Dr.
Johnson's kicking of the stone to refute Berkeley was a deserved kick, and
even Byron's fun was justified in his tipsy lines,
"When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said."
All things are spirit surely enough; but the phenomena of matter, as
transformed spirit, are related to each other under the laws of what we
necessarily designate as material nature. Little by little, through long
and hard exertion, we find out what these relations are, and how they are
fitted to the human center of them. Some things are good to eat and to
nourish us; others to poison and kill us. A cold or fever may be a
manifestation of spirit, and an herb or drug may be another; but if the
herb or drug counteracts and destroys the cold or the fever, and
experience proves it ten thousand times, who cares to analyze a dose of
aconite or a cup of saffron-tea into a draft of "mortal" or "immortal"
mind? The process is a mere fooling with ideals--hysterics jumping at the
moon. _On metaphysical grounds_--as far as anybody knows what metaphysics
really means--there is no need that our physicians, if they are "good
physicians," should trouble themselves much about a Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy. Esculapius came into the world long before her, and his followers
will stay in it long after her materialized divinity has risen into a more
spiritual and a more intelligent state.
The same may be said of our theologians. Their creeds have not come out of
nothing, however much the spirit of them may have grown thick and muddy
through crude understandings. The Christian Church, surely, can yet offer
to mankind something better than the Eddy "Church Scientist"; and if it
can, it is in no ultimate jeopardy from a few, or a few hundred,
congregations of half-educated faddists.
For a student of history--not in its moments, but in its decades and
centuries--it is easy to see that "Christian Science" has the reason of
the fact and _the spread of it_, in its being a protest against the
depressing materialism around it--a materialism which, though rationally
decapitated by Kant, has shown marvelous activity, for a corpse, ever
since the execution.
The medical profession, too, has partly, if indirectly, been responsible
for Mrs. Eddy's crazy horse of "metaphysics," running away in the dark,
and butting its own brains out. From Dr. Mesmer to Dr. Charcot, it took
about a hundred and twenty years for "animal magnetism," under the softer
names of "hypnotism" and "suggestion," to achieve full and final standing
in the French Academy of Medicine; and the mental phenomena attending
"mesmerism" have still but little "respectability" among "regular
physicians." But, that curative agencies are not confined to drugs has
long been settled in the public mind--such part of the public mind, at
least, as permits itself any considerable reading and thinking.
Has the pulpit itself--orthodox and not so orthodox--contributed to the
success of Eddy "Science"? We must say it has. The practise, among the
sects, of twisting the Bible out of its straight, historical, natural
significance, and fitting its texts to every sort of whim, folly, and
malefaction--this general practise has at last culminated in Mrs. Eddy's
_Key to the Scriptures_, with pretty nearly the dissolution of them in the
abomination of interpretation.
But "Christian Science"--the Eddy misfit for a specious name--has had its
rise, and it has probably risen about as high as it can reach,
notwithstanding its rapid extension for the moment. Only its protrusion
from insignificance and non-attention was needed to uncover its foundation
on the sands of ignorance, its strength in the perennial weakness and
credulity of mankind, and its business success in ordinary, or more than
ordinary, business cupidity. Has it done no good in the world, then? Ah,
that is another question. Whatever may have been the chief motive of its
founder, and whatever may have been its "comedy of errors," it has forced
the inception of a movement that, as a whole, may have vast results for
the human mind and the human body. Whatever material medicines may be
necessary to mankind while they themselves are in a material condition,
psychic forces in the cure of disease can no longer be ignored. What is
the extent, and what the limit, of these forces, is a problem that must be
examined. As conditionally--here and now--man is _both spiritual and
corporeal_--it would seem to be a self-evident conclusion that he must
have both material and spiritual aids to health. That we can "jump" our
condition, before we get out of it, is the most tremendous paradox ever
presented to the human mind; but the sequences--even physical--of
systematically opening the finite soul to the Infinite Spirit may be
incalculable. The revival, or definite rediscovery, in modern times, of
healing the sick by the soul and the laying-on of hands, came to pass some
fifty years ago, in the United States, through the honest, single-minded,
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. If the spirit of evil--of hypocrisy, selfishness
and avarice--has entered into the movement of mental healing through
another source, the frequent necessity of very human means to divine ends
is once more illustrated.
CHAPTER XVIII.
VARIOUS SCHOOLS OF THE NEW THOUGHT.
Just now, the general cause of metaphysical therapeutics is separating
rapidly into various "schools," few of them having much consideration for
the pretentious health-trust, "Christian Science."
In the South, for instance--at Sea Breeze, Florida--a Mrs. Helen Wilmans
has founded a settlement of houses and lands, souls and bodies, with
books, pamphlets, and a weekly press, all devoted, mentally, morally and
physically, to psychic dominion over all things. _Freedom_ is the name of
the organ that specially spreads Mrs. Wilmans' light and curatives. She
has capacity in a comparative degree, and energy, with self-confidence, in
the superlative. She proclaims this:
"Intellectual power in the individual comes from concentration of the mind
upon an idea until the truth or falsity of the idea becomes apparent.
Likewise the power of the race in the unfoldment of a race problem must
come from a concentrated effort to discover a hitherto unfolded racial
capacity; and this is the meaning of the movement I am inaugurating here."
The Wilmans' conception of mind-healing has been illustrated as follows by
a correspondent of _Freedom_, who discusses and admits the curing of
disease among devout Catholics, exalted and prayerful, at the shrine of
St. Anne in Illinois. It is all natural, he says:
"If with equally strong belief they should pray to God, Buddha, St. Peter
or Paul, Mrs. Eddy or Mrs. Wilmans, or a stump or stone--or should they
stand on their heads, or drink water from a certain river, or anoint the
sick parts with clay and spittle--the result would be the same. Their mind
would cure their bodies. Mind is king."
In some respects, the paper, _Freedom_, is almost as free from "material
sense" as the book, _Science and Health_. Mrs. Wilmans has a correspondent
who asserts, and probably believes, that, by the concentrated power of her
finite female mind, she has "never failed once in five years to avert the
fury of severe summer storms." She has "demonstrated," she says, the
dominion of mind over material nature, "as clearly as any Mental Scientist
has demonstrated it over disease."
And here is an official announcement from Mrs. Wilmans' organ:
"_Freedom_ is the only paper published whose leading and constantly avowed
object is to overcome death right here in this world and right now. If you
want to learn something of the newly-discovered power vested in man which
fits him for this stupendous conquest, read this paper, and keep on
reading it."
"The new thought" has traveled West as far as South. It recently had among
its organs _The Temple_, of Denver, Colorado, "a monthly magazine devoted
to the fuller unfoldment of the divinity of humanity," the editor of which
was Mr. Paul Tyner, who afterwards conducted the _Arena_ of Boston,
consolidated with _The Journal of Practical Metaphysics_. The purpose of
the latter periodical was "the unification of scientific and spiritual
thought and the new philosophy of health." The editor was Horatio W.
Dresser, a Harvard graduate, an excellent philosopher of the ontological
trend, and a polished writer, reminding one partly of Spinoza and partly
of Emerson. Mr. Dresser's books, _The Power of Silence_, _The Perfect
Whole_, and others, have given him a wide reputation in his particular
field of work, and have constituted him a center of the most logical and
scholarly literature connected with "metaphysical healing." This
literature, too extensive for specialized designation, is under the
propagandism of the Boston "Metaphysical Club," an active and growing
organization.
The Boston "Metaphysical Club" comprises too much exact information and
solid learning to accept or countenance the extreme vagaries of "Christian
Science," and appears to be acting as a balance-wheel to the whole
movement of "the new thought." In a recent leaflet the Club has taken
special occasion to dissect and repudiate that most preposterous doctrine
of Mrs. Eddy's "science," the absolute nothingness of matter.
The title of the leaflet referred to is _Christian Science and the New
Metaphysical Movement_, with the added phrase, _An Intelligent
Discrimination Desirable_. One excerpt is this:
"Christian Science proclaims the unreality of matter, and of the body. The
rational and broader thought, not only admits the validity of the body, as
veritable expression, but claims that it is as good, in its own place and
plane, as is the soul and spirit. While susceptible to mental molding, it
is neither an error nor an illusion. Moreover, it is friendly to its
welfare to affirm both its validity and goodness. It is to be ruled,
beautified, and utilized in its own order, and not denied an existence.
Even admitting that the whole cosmos is, in the last analysis, but one
Universal Mind and its manifestation; even admitting that all matter is
but a lower vibration of spirit, and that the human body is essentially a
mental rather than a physical organism; still, matter has its own relative
reality and validity, and is not to be ignored as illusion."
Of its kind, nothing better than this could be said even by a Hegel. It is
exactly the correct statement of the great metaphysical truth.
The leaflet agrees with the criticism of this volume, that "the spirit of
Christian Science is autocratic rather than democratic," and says:
"Its polity and ritual, in every detail, are shaped and directed
arbitrarily by a single will. There is no room for investigation, liberty
of thought, progress, or further revelation. There is no recognition of
related physical science or evolutionary progress."
The monograph continues thus:
"The liberal movement stands for freedom of soul, and is in no way opposed
to subordinate orders of truth.... It does not ignore the good in existing
systems, disparage reasonable hygiene, or deny the place of certain
departments of surgery. It is not insensible to the present and
provisional uses of simple external therapeutic agencies, at least until
individual unfoldment and the recognition of higher law become more
general.... While understanding, both from experience and observation,
that a systematic employment of mental potency in a rational, scientific,
and idealistic manner has a wonderful and unappreciated healing energy,
its exponents do not think it necessary to form a new and exclusive
religious sect."
The main premise, of course, of all the schools of "mind-healing" is that
"the mind can and should control the body." Let us go straight from this
premise to the manner of applying it, as explained, for instance, in a
little book entitled _The New Philosophy of Health_, excellently well
written, by a Miss Harriet B. Bradbury.
"The healer [says this author] simply holds in mind with great tenacity,
for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, an image of the patient as he should
be. This image, by the process known as 'thought transference' is
impressed upon the sick man's mind as a possibility, when his own strong
desire, seizing it, is able to reproduce it as an actuality. He may be
quite unconscious that he has done anything for himself, and when he finds
himself well, gives all the credit to the man who, as he thinks, has
'healed' him. Yet the change is wrought by no man, but by the great
life-giving force which two wills working in harmony have called into
perfect action."
In confirmation of "the law of mental causation," Miss Bradbury says:
"The most significant of recent biological experiments are those which
have been conducted at the Smithsonian Institute with a view to
discovering the physical effects of different mental states. They have
proved that the different emotions produce immediate chemical changes
within the physical organism, and it only remains to continue the
investigation to learn just how each habitual emotion is finally reflected
upon the outward frame."
So that "old mesmerist," Dr. Quimby--for this was exactly his view--has
got along as far as the Smithsonian Institute at Washington. And here let
us introduce the names and cogitations of a few authorities so "eminently
respectable" that the "very best and most conservative people" need not
shrink from becoming acquainted with them.
In a work on _Practical Idealism_, William DeWitt Hyde, President of
Bowdoin College, tells us:
"There are certain classes of disease for which hypnotic treatment is
highly beneficial. Mental healing in all its various forms, in so far as
it is valuable, rests on the principle that body and mind are very closely
inter-related through the partly conscious but chiefly unconscious control
of the vital functions through the nervous system; and that the state of
the mind at any given time, and consequently the state of the body, in so
far as we know it at that time, is made up of a relatively small
presentation of sensation, and a very large contribution of associations.
Hence a very slight suggestion through the senses, by speech, or physical
contact, or eradication of fixed images, anxieties, and fears, may
introduce a new nucleus around which an entirely new set of associations
will cluster; so that through the renewing of the mind the body may come
to be transformed."
Charles Van Norden, D.D., LL.D., at one time President of Elmira College,
tells us in his outline of psychology, _The Psychic Factor_, that
"So tremendous is this power of mind over body, that disease may often be
cured and ailments caused by a new idea."
"A woman [says Rev. Dr. Van Orden] once came to Surgeon-General Hammond
with what he considered an incurable disorder. She sighed as she turned to
go away disconsolate, saying, 'Ah, if I but had some of the water of
Lourdes!'--for she was a devout Catholic. Now it so happened that a friend
had brought the doctor a bottle of the genuine water of Lourdes to
experiment with. He informed the patient of this, and promised her some
provided she would first try a more potent remedy, Aqua Crotonis (New York
City aqueduct water). The woman consented, but protesting that this latter
could not reach the case. He then gave her a little vial of the real
article, but labeled 'Aqua Crotonis.' When this had failed he gave her
Croton water, but labeled 'Water of Lourdes.' The result was a complete
cure."
Prof. William James, of Harvard, in the chapter of his _Principles of
Psychology_ treating "the production of movement," quotes many authorities
and gives various diagrams illustrating the effects of sensations and
emotions upon the pulse, the respiration, the glands, muscles, and other
organs and functions of men and animals. The celebrated Prof. Bain is
quoted as saying that "according as an impression is accompanied with
_feeling_, the aroused currents diffuse themselves over the brain, leading
to a general agitation of the moving organs, as well as affecting the
viscera." The conclusion of Prof. James is that
"Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, we might say that every
possible feeling produces a movement, and that every movement is a
movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts."
"The effect," says Prof. James, "of fear, shame and anger, upon the
blood-supply of the skin, especially the skin of the face, are too well
known to need remark. Sensations of the higher senses produce, according
to Couty and Charpentier, the most varied effects upon the pulse-rate and
blood-pressure of dogs."
Now if the higher emotions of dogs produce marked effects upon their
physical structure, we must naturally infer that hope, faith, joy--all,
indeed, of the loftier emotions of human beings--may set up high and
healthful movements in the human body, while base emotions set up low,
harmful, and diseased conditions. In this claim, anyhow, we have,
according to "metaphysical healing," the cause and cure of disease,
capped, too, with the ethics of "the new thought."
Thomas Jay Hudson, in his book, _The Law of Psychic Phenomena_, gives this
compend of the facts:
"The science of psycho-therapeutics is yet in its infancy. Thus far just
enough has been learned to stimulate research. It has been demonstrated
that there is a psychic power inherent in man which can be employed for
the amelioration of his own physical condition, as well as that of his
fellows. When this is said, nearly all the ground covered by present
knowledge has been embraced. It is true that many wonderful cures have
been effected, many marvelous phenomena developed. Nevertheless, all are
groping in the dark, with only an occasional glimmering of distant light
shed upon the subject; and this light serves principally to show how
little is now known, compared with what there is yet to learn."
In discussing the conditions necessary to psychic healing, Mr. Hudson
affirms that the exemplar and healer of Nazareth, the founder of our
Christian religion, always recognized these conditions in the "miracles"
imputed to him. We shall end our quotations, at this point, with one from
Mr. Hudson's chapter on "The Physical Manifestations and Philosophy of
Christ."
"I do not mean to say that Jesus could not heal in such cases where the
mental environment was unfavorable; but the fact that he took infinite
pains, wherever practicable, to secure the best conditions, shows that he
understood the law and worked within its limitations. Certain it is that
he never performed any of his wonderful works outside the laws which he
proclaimed, nor did he ever intimate that he could do so. It is true that
his biographers do not always relate the details of the transactions
recorded; but it must be remembered that they wrote at a later day, and
may not have been in possession of all the details. It is, however, a
marvelous fact, and is one which constitutes indubitable evidence of the
truth of his history, that in no instance do they relate a single act
performed or word spoken by him, relating to the healing of the sick,
which does not reveal his perfect knowledge of and compliance with the
laws which pertain to mental therapeutics as they are revealed in modern
times through experiment and the processes of inductive reasoning."
CHAPTER XIX.
AN ADVANCED HEALER OF TO-DAY.
Recapitulating what we have been over, it appears that "metaphysical
healing" is simply the suggestion and determination of health--the ideal
photograph, as it were, of health--transferred from the well to the ill,
in the conviction that Universal Spirit is the principle of all health,
which we may receive from its Source by opening ourselves to it. That is
to say, the health of the Infinite Spirit, so far as absorbed by a finite
spirit, corrects finite errors of mind, and the mind, thus corrected,
corrects, or cures, the body. Such, certainly, was the "truth-cure" of
Phineas P. Quimby. With him, starting as a mesmerist, it was, really, a
kind of normal and sacred hypnotism, by which he endeavored to put his
patients under the close, immediate influence and operation of Supreme
Life, and Sympathy, and Vigor.
Such treatment should do much for the ailing--how much we must wait to
know.
But the effects of it must have limits, and these limits must be the
general, the fixed conditions, of what we designate as mind and matter. It
may be well to re-state these conditions, but with focal reference to this
point--the one vital point of our whole theme.
Metaphysically speaking, we are spirit, and all else is spirit. But what
_is_ spirit? What are the constituents of it, to the extent that man may
grasp them?
First, is the universal principle of intelligent conjunctive unity,
instinctive and conscious, which, individualized in men and animals,
manufactures, or sub-creates, all the unities of their environment, which
they take to be "the forms of matter."
Second, is the equally universal principle of subjective (negative)
sensibility--the receptiveness of spirit in its forms called "the senses."
Transmuted through these senses, ultimate objective spirit--to us "the
unknown and unknowable"--furnishes the filling, or contents, of what
consciousness and sub-consciousness make up, or unify, into objects.
Third, is the vast fact of Spirit-background--Infinite Spirit "in
itself"--which is revealed, and can only be revealed, _to the finite_, as
transformed through fixed modes of finite receptivity.
A man, therefore, is simply an individualization of the process by which
the Absolute--That Which Is--expresses itself and lives. Whatever may be
our environment under some changed state of our receptivity--say "the
future life"--our environment of spirit objected through sense, in space
and time, is the environment of _matter_; and the human body is a part of
it. We are not only "in matter," therefore, but we sub-create the matter,
through our God-given modes of sensuous receptivity, and can only escape
from it through an entire change of those modes, called "senses." The door
of escape is the door of death, and no human being has ever avoided it.
_Can_ any human being avoid it? We say _no_: because to be out of matter
is to be out of the kind of receptiveness--our five senses--through which
matter itself exists. If there be exceptional persons of clairvoyant
susceptibility, who can pass sufficiently out of our average material
condition to realize aught beyond them, the _bodily_ state of these
persons, too, must end, as we all end.
Let us not mix conditions, like the metaphysical tyros of Christian
Science; but while we are in the state of spirit known and experienced as
mind _and_ matter, let us acknowledge the plain fact. As a corollary of
this fact, if we are out of health, let us look to remedies good for _both
mind and matter_--the body and the soul. Such will probably be the
ultimate equipoise between "mental medicine" and material curatives.
This, at any rate, is the best conclusion for "the new thought" that the
scribe at hand can reach. He may be wrong; for he is totally "uninspired,"
and has nothing to follow but his nose and his "mortal mind." But, the
conclusion once reached, he stood on it as an _a-priori_ breathing-spot.
And then it occurred to him that, peradventure, some radical, independent
son of Galen might be conducting the business of therapeutics on a
psycho-corporeal, double platform. If so, Boston would be the place to
look for him, and the search was begun. In due time it was successful. The
result may at least prove suggestive and entertaining.
Let our new friend be called Prof. P.; for he has been an instructor in
his kind of work, and he bears the title of "doctor" only by the courtesy
of his patients, as Dr. Quimby did.
Now it is certain that if Prof. P. does not cure all sorts of diseases,
his patients think he does, vouch for it when questioned, and give most
sincere testimonials to that effect. Even the cure of cancer is vigorously
affirmed, and in connection with cases that have been given up by eminent
physicians. But, as this book is doing no medical advertising, one
ordinary instance of Prof. P.'s work must suffice.
A large, strong woman, as the consequence of a fall, incurred violent
sciatic rheumatism, and was treated at a hospital for three months, being
worse at the end of that time than at first. On personally interviewing
her--and she is a woman of more than average intelligence--she informed
the writer that, in one treatment of twenty minutes, Prof. P. had
"entirely cured" her, and that after five months--which had elapsed at the
time of the conversation--there had been no recurrence of her trouble.
Our search for light has led to a somewhat close acquaintance with Prof.
P. and has induced him to explain his theory and practise of healing, for
our use as a writer, excepting a few of his personal discoveries not
immediately important to the public, which he must withhold, he says, for
something like the same reason that his learned brothers, the physicians,
write their prescriptions in Latin.
Prof. P. requires it to be said explicitly that he is a Spiritualist. He
is so pronounced in the faith that he impatiently scoffs at all denial,
evasion or concealment, of what he deems his "positive knowledge" that we
exist after "our mere change of condition called death," and that "the
spirits of our departed friends are interested in our earthly welfare." He
declares, however, that Dr. Quimby was sensible in not trusting spirit
communications at the expense of his own judgment--"as, taking the long
generations of mankind, there are necessarily more fools disembodied than
in the flesh."
According to our friend P., there are now four great remedial agencies
possible to healing the sick, apart from medicines in the usual sense. The
intelligent and careful use of such medicines he believes in, and he seeks
to cooperate with all broad-minded physicians, rather than to antagonize
them. The more occult, but often more effective agencies, than drugs or
herbs, he says, are these:
_First_: Animal Magnetism.
_Second_: Natural Healing-Power--this power being inherent to some extent
in all human beings, but greatly concentrated and developed in certain
individuals.
_Third_: Mental or Psychic Force--a force existing in both embodied and
disembodied spirits, and as a universal principle.
_Fourth_: "Sensitized" devices containing these powers and elements, with
the function of imparting them to the ailing and the weary.
"Magnetism," says our Professor, "as a material phenomenon, is a force so
potent that it rearranges the unsystematized molecules of certain metals,
and gives them harmonious direction and integral traction. The application
of it--termed polarization--has been known even to produce 'clicks' within
metallic bodies, loud enough to be distinctly heard. Animal magnetism,
pertaining to organized beings, acts upon their corresponding but higher
molecules in the same general way. The sick are disordered, locally
clogged, 'out of tune.' They have lost, as it were, their polarity. Animal
magnetism restores it to them. It then goes further and vitalizes them;
for, if imparted to the feeble by a person strong, well, and stored full
of it, an equilibrium takes place between an operator and his patient.
Animal magnetism, however unconsciously utilized, doubtless takes part in
all so-called 'mind-cures' that are _physical_ afflictions, not the
results of bugaboos and whimsies. The absurd fulminations of Mrs. Eddy, at
this late day, against animal magnetism, are only equaled by the
comprehensive ignorance, in general, which Bishop Brooks is said to have
considered the only possible excuse for the production of a book like
_Science and Health_.
"Inherent Healing Power is more occult than animal magnetism, but has
become almost as well established. According to the accepted evidence of
centuries, this power was fully exemplified in ancient times by the most
faithful and unselfish of all the sons of God and man, Jesus, our Christ.
According to recent and contemporary evidence, both widespread and exact,
the Protestant world of late centuries has had no example of the same
quality so marked as that of Dr. P. P. Quimby. Inherent healing power goes
with close and tender sympathy for the afflicted, and grows with use, like
the brawn of a stevedore, or the intellectual dexterity of a practised
writer. It may eventuate in a Quimby as naturally as the poetic faculty
eventuates in a Kipling.
"By mental or psychic force," says the Professor, "I mean the principle of
apprehending, understanding, and reasoning, with the moral elements
pertaining to conscience and will. This combination of our essential
being, in whatever phase of it we may exist, affects and modifies, if it
does not altogether dominate, all the rest of our make-up. Its importance
is very great, but may be exaggerated by forgetting that man is a
microcosm, and that while he is in the externalized condition of spirit
known as matter he is not at the same time _out_ of it. For the finite to
put itself in harmony with the Infinite, by right thinking, right feeling,
right conduct, is indispensable to the highest health; but an imaginary
union with God through fictitious conceptions of our own ego is unnatural
and unwholesome exaltation, inducing disease of the mind, whatever it may
do to the body.
"Psychic power is an absolutely universal principle, common, in degree, to
men, spirits, and God. It is sometimes employed by hypnotists to such an
extent that the physical sensation of a subject is rendered void, even
under amputation of a bodily member. It can destroy the taste for
intoxicants in a drunkard. It can supplant melancholia with hope and
cheerfulness. What it can _not_ do is yet a problem.
"Of course such a power is a part, and great part, of sane therapeutics.
In the application of it," said the Professor, with much warmth, "I
affirm--let those who have not my knowledge and experience think what
their ignorance or prejudice saddles upon them--that 'departed spirits,'
as we call them, combine their efforts with those of men and women, to
heal the sick. The power is thus redoubled.
"We have taken but a few steps in this sort of knowledge, and it is
accompanied by a plenty of deception and twaddle. But the truth underlying
it has now procured a hearing even before eminently timid 'societies of
psychical research,' and will soon conquer them, as mesmerism has done.
Certain spirit-conditions are coming to be rationalized. In this country,
for instance, the spirits of Indians everywhere manifest themselves,
especially in connection with the cures of disease. The reason is simple.
Indians were close to the earth, near to nature, in their lives, and they
enjoy the scene of their old 'hunting grounds' more than such etherealized
spirits as were slightly attached to it. But spirit-aid in therapeutics is
mostly co-operative. Essential physicians, whether in our state of being
or the higher state, feel an interest in their pursuit, and practise it.
The most intelligent guide their assistants; but robust spirits of earthly
qualities and attractions sometimes furnish a basic healing force that is
almost physical."
Prof. P.'s system of healing is remarkable enough in all ways; but his
claims for his "sensitized devices" would be too astounding for credence
were it not that the things appear "to work," just as he says they will.
Seemingly, they are nothing but small metallic plates; but they are
charged, he affirms, with earth-magnetism as a "power-house," and then
with animal magnetism, with natural human healing quality, with
attractiveness to spirit-co-operation in that quality, and finally with
psychic power and control--that is, direction of mind and will. In other
words, Prof. P. says that, after twenty years of study and experiment he
can transmit to his "sensitized devices," and store in them, all the four
great healing agencies which can be employed in therapeutics apart from
ordinary medicines.
By such means, he affirms, "not only healing, but instantaneous healing,"
to the extent at least of immediate relief from pain, can always be
effected in all cases adapted to his treatment.
"Christian Science," he says--"mind-cure--faith-cure--oh yes, they
'demonstrate' over things, as the phrase goes. I admit it, at least in
some instances. But, at their very best, they all _take time_. The patient
must wait to exalt himself into some vision or condition he is told about,
or to accept some theological doctrine or other, whether true or false.
Suppose a man is knotted up with rheumatism, has a fit, or is insane. I
don't wait for him to build up a belief, or to get into harmony with the
Highest. I take him just as he is, clap my sensitizers on him, go to work
myself, and, if he is not too far gone for aid on earth, I restore an
equilibrium of body and brain. If I do this--if I instantly drive away the
worst kind of pain--if I retrieve lost consciousness or a disordered
mind--I can put faith enough into my patient for a beginning. Later, I
will attend to his theology to the extent of my knowledge, if he desires
my services as a priest."
The operation of Prof. P.'s sensitized appliances, according to his claim
for them, is correction and vitalization of both mind and body, when
disarranged or "ill," and then concentration of power in accordance with
location of disease or pain. "As strange as it may seem," he says, "these
little pieces of metal take upon themselves the physical and mental
conditions of sickness, which can even be conveyed by them from one person
to another, as I have proved by various experiments. But these conditions
can be discharged from the plates, or 'grounded,' like electricity, and
this, too, without destroying the higher, firmer, normal charge of health
and strength.
"Do you look incredulous; do you smile with a tinge of pity?" asked Prof.
P., as he talked. "Wait a minute. You have heard of Dr. Luys, one of the
most distinguished physicians in the world, Charcot's favorite assistant,
and now the head of the great Charity Hospital of Paris. Not long ago he
had a patient--a young woman who had suffered nervous prostration, and was
losing her mind from melancholia. She was affectionate, and greatly
attached to her family. But she became aware that her love was strangely
turning to aversion, which she could not control. Frightened and ashamed,
she went to Dr. Luys. He tried everything he could think of to cure her,
but unavailingly. At his wits' end--not knowing _what_ to do--he took up,
one day, a large electro-magnet, and, as a pure experiment of impulse,
fastened it to her head. He was suddenly called away for three-quarters of
an hour. Returning, he found his patient weak, but her head better and
clearer than usual. Dismissing her, he put the magnet on his own head,
took the chair she had sat in, and remained there as long as she had
done. He then went to dine with his wife and children, of whom he is very
fond. But, greatly to his surprise, he found that, with no fault of their
own, they were not agreeable to him. _He had taken the conditions of his
patient._
"He was keen enough to recognize the fact, and announce it to his
profession and the world. He drew the conclusion that the electro-magnet
can absorb morbid brain-influences. Also that it can transfer such
influences from the sick to the well, though two healthy persons are not
affected by it. He added that the transference of conditions from the
healthy to the diseased almost always benefits them.
"I am not hanging on 'high authorities,'" continued the Professor, "but
they are sometimes useful to me. There is Dr. Julius Althaus, of Berlin, a
member, too, of the English Royal College of Physicians. As explained in a
recent issue of the _Lancet_, the chief English organ of the medical
fraternity, Dr. Althaus is now rejuvenating old age, and prolonging our
present term of life, by certain galvano-electric appliances--which, by
the way, he does not tell quite all about. Henry Irving is understood to
have been held back from the infirmities of advancing years, and restored
to the stage, by Dr. Althaus."
Prof. P. claims to have been at work half a life-time in the general
direction indicated by the experiments and achievements of Luys and
Althaus, but to have been so busy that he has had no time to think about a
degree of M. D. "The world," he says, "should be very grateful to these
eminent gentlemen, and _I_ certainly am grateful; for though I anticipated
the happenings of Dr. Luys by several years, and though almost any
'magnetic healer' would assert the _hypothesis_, at least, of Dr. Althaus,
my own theories and results are so far beyond my epoch that without the
steps, however short, taken by such men as Luys and Althaus, I could get
no sort of hearing. I am often laughed at, of course, as a 'crank'; but I
generally laugh last--for, as the phrase goes nowadays, I 'get there.'"
CHAPTER XX.
CONCLUSION.
The moral of our story is an old one, always new. "There are more things
in heaven and earth than"--anybody short of Mary Baker G. Eddy can put
into a "science." From this text it would be logical to educe a cyclopedia
every month or so. But one little point will do here.
The practise of medicine, notwithstanding its grand achievements, is still
in its infancy. When I am ill, I call a doctor--the best in the vicinity.
It is the custom; and, as Montaigne said, _Que sais-je?_ I am not sure of
much, and when I have "_grippe_" I am quite certain of less than ever. But
the materials I have lately been at work on make me wish that "my doctor,"
instead of scorning all new things, would look into some of them, and add
them to his acquirements. He will have no need to accept "Christian
Science," which has been accurately described as "a way of getting cured
of things by believing something that isn't true." I must excuse "my
doctor" from accepted that inverted "science." But the general subject of
occult and psychic healing is worthy of his attention. "My doctor" knows
much: but, if he should enlarge his knowledge just a little, my faith in
him would stand the increment.
One thing I shall insist on. "My doctor" must not endeavor to supersede
Torquemada, Henry the Eighth, and the learned ecclesiastical doctors of
the Inquisition. He must not interfere with the right of private judgment
in saving the body, as they did in saving the soul. In such a case I
should count them his superiors, inasmuch as the soul is really worth more
than its external machinery, which, in a few years, more or less, must
wear out and go to the cemetery.
The Inquisition honestly held a theory that the soul could only be saved
by accepting a certain creed, and ought to be saved even at the cost of
breaking the body on a wheel. The Inquisition would have been right, if
its creed had really been the thing supposed. But four centuries of
Protestantism have established a different theory: it is that, whatever
any creed may be or do, every man has the prerogative of deciding for
himself the manner of thinking which shall raise him to heaven or lower
him to sheol. Still, I repeat, the soul is worth more than the body, and
if Protestantism applies to the greater, it should apply to the less.
Some things have been settled, I suppose, by long experience, and have
become matters of law for the protection of nations. Civilization requires
that a man who knows nothing of physiology shall not practise surgery;
that scarlet fever shall be quarantined; that school-children shall be
saved from small-pox by vaccination. Medical degrees certify that the
holders have studied medicine long enough at least to know something about
it in a way that the common judgment recognises. Nothing is to be said
against such requirements impartially applied to a whole people. They
simply must be enforced. Christian Science opposes them, dodges them when
it can; for it holds that human beings have no bodies except reflections
of a wretched lie called "mortal mind." In spite of its source, this
dangerous form of insanity should be dealt with as gently as possible,
but certainly should not go unrestrained.[59] Let it conform to laws, not
special to any religion or to any humbug masquerading as a religion, but
general to the citizens who compose a free and sane community.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From $3.18 to $6.
[2] Mrs. Eddy's statement in her book, _Retrospection and Introspection_,
p. 61.
[3] For proof in detail see Chapters III. and IV.
[4] Our historical sources of information are referred to as we go along,
but a good deal of it has come from access to original documents, and from
living persons of the highest character who were long and intimately
acquainted with the subject of our chapter. The names of some of these
friends are given by permission.
[5] This circular alone--furnished to the writer by Dr. Quimby's son--is
complete proof as to origin of "mind-healing" in the United States.
[6] The reader is advised to consult the pamphlet and the book here
specified, in connection with our chapter. (Geo. H. Ellis, Publisher,
Boston)--G. C.
[7] These press articles and notices have been examined by the writer, and
are unmistakably genuine, as are the selections.
[8] U. S. Court of Admiralty. Judge Ware was sometimes spoken of as the
leading citizen of Maine.
[9] _The True History of Mental Science_, page 15.
[10] Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, page 53-54.
[11] Mrs. Sarah Ware Mackay.
[12] The gentleman is Hon. Edwin Reed, of Boston, Mass. His name is given
by his permission, from a feeling of gratitude to Dr. Quimby, and profound
respect for his memory.
[13] Mrs. Eddy's complete name, with reference to these gentlemen, would
be Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy.
[14] The writer has had these records authenticated at Portland.--G. C.
[15] The original print has been in my hands. A copy of the letter is
published in full in _The True History of Mental Science_ (Appendix
A).--G. C.
[16] The gentleman here traduced is Dr. L. M. Marston of Boston. He is a
practising physician, and a thoughtful, honest man. He is the author of a
well-written book entitled, _Essentials of Mental Healing_, which is much
superior to _Science and Health_, though containing some of the overdone
conceptions of mind-cure in general. But Dr. Marston properly employs
material as well as mental medicine.--G. C.
[17] _Retrospection and Introspection_, by Mary Baker G. Eddy, 10th
thousand, 1896. Pages 7, 8, 9.
[18] Ibid., page 35.
[19] _Retrospection and Introspection_, p. 10.
[20] Ibid., Page 12.
[21] The Great Novel, p. 17.
[22] _Retrospection and Introspection_, p. 28 to p. 35.
[23] The holy romance, page 28 and rest of chapter.
[24] _Retrospection and Introspection_, page 61.
[25] _Retrospection and Introspection_, p. 29.
[26] I have seen a brief article of his, entitled "Aristocracy and
Democracy," and written under date of February, 1863, in which he said:
"The religion of Christ is shown in the progress of Christian Science,
while the religion of society decays in proportion as liberal principles
are developed."--G. C.
[27] _Retrospection and Introspection_, from p. 40 to p. 43.
[28] This was half a century ago; but the productions--not "scribblings,"
of course, like Dr. Quimby's writings--are yet in mind among Mrs. Eddy's
old acquaintances. One critic of them has said: "They were stories wherein
the 'feller' married the girl in the last chapter, and they lived happily
ever after except when the baby was cutting teeth. The stories were not
essays, were not metaphysical, and were hardly physical. Had Mrs. Eddy not
written them, I never should have remembered them at all."
[29] _Retrospection and Introspection_, p. 38 to p. 46.
[30] Page 45.
[31] "Judge Hanna" is Mrs. Eddy's literary factotum. Mr. Tott is an actual
personage, but, being "in Science," he will probably never recognize his
picture--especially as there are many like him.
[32] See advertisements in all Christian Science publications.
[33] Page 47.
[34] This crude materialistic conception of "God" as "filling space" shows
most beautifully the Kindergarten quality of Mother Eddy's "metaphysics."
[35] The figures stand for the pages referred to.
[36] _Retrospection and Introspection_, p. 51.
[37] These facts are well remembered and well recorded. They were of
special interest to such of Mrs. Eddy's "loyal students" as had seceded
from her cult.--G. C.
[38] _Retrospection and Introspection_, p. 57.
[39] See _Christian Science History_, by Septimus J. Hanna, p. 42.
[40] For this amazing snivel see _Retrospection and Introspection_, p. 61.
[41] This chapter is written mostly from personal inspection and
knowledge. An elaborate description of the Church is given in The
Christian Science Journal for January, 1895.--G. C.
[42] _Retrospection and Introspection_, page 62.
[43] Published in the _Christian Science Journal_ of April, 1895.
[44] _War in Heaven: Sixteen Years' Experience in Christian Science,
Mind-Healing. By Josephine Curtis Woodbury. Third Edition. Boston, Mass.
Press of Samuel Usher, 1897._
[45] Several suits are pending as this book goes to press. One suit has
been "thrown out of court." It should be said, perhaps, that one of Mrs.
Woodbury's attorneys, F. W. Peabody, Esq., has such an abhorrence of
"Christian Science" in general, that he has been willing to take the part
of anybody who could enable him to expose Mrs. Eddy. In this good work may
he not be discouraged.
[46] The extraordinary matters of this chapter, however well or ill
suppressed, were all published, with great detail, in the issues of the
_Traveler_ from Dec. 12th to 22d, 1896, and from January 11th to 25th,
1897. Here they have simply been put into brief form, and relieved of all
unnecessary harshness. The papers have been preserved for evidence and are
in my hands.--G. C.
[47] The story, with many details, in issue of Dec. 14, 1896.
[48] A long story underlies the unfortunate marriage and separation of the
lady and gentleman involved in this case. But the facts are not essential
to the one and only subject of these pages, "Christian Science."
[49] Issue of Dec. 12, 1896.
[50] There were really two papers handed to Mr. Chamberlain, and he was to
take his choice between them. The case, too, was withdrawn, not wholly on
account of one thing, but many things which Mrs. Woodbury's lawyer found
it impossible to contend against. But the most direct cause of the
withdrawal is the one given.
[51] Boston _Traveler_, January 21, 1897.
[52] Until it is learned that generation rests on no sexual basis, let
marriage continue. Spirit will ultimately claim its own, and the voices of
physical sense be forever hushed.--_Science and Health_, page 274.
[53] January 15, 1897.
[54] I have seen what I suppose to be true copies of a series of letters
written by Mary Nash and different members of her family, with one or two
from some of Mrs. Woodbury's "loyal students." The letters might possibly
be taken to show that inharmony existed in the Nash family, and that the
daughter stayed away from father, mother and brothers on that account,
instead of being, if such was the case, just where a sensible and
affectionate daughter was most needed. The letters, at any rate, show the
most united affection for _her_, and more than willingness to do anything
she asked, if she would only return to her home. When finally she did so,
two physicians, according to Mr. Nash, declared her to be under hypnotic
control. Letters, under hypnotism, are suspect.--G. C.
[55] The chapters of our book from XI. to XVI. inclusive, were, in
substance, written at the request of Dr. William T. Harris, United States
Commissioner of Education, and published in his _Journal of Speculative
Philosophy_ for December, 1893, under the caption of "The Secret of Kant."
These chapters, while too abstruse for light readers, really explain what
"Christian Science" ignorantly chatters about as "Metaphysics."--G. C.
[56] As this book, including the present chapter, is for readers who may
or may not understand German, our quotations from Kant are taken from his
_Critique_ as in the old familiar, accessible translation by J. M. D.
Meiklejohn (Bohn's Philosophical Library--edition of 1860).
[57] _Critique of Pure Reason_; General Remarks on Transcendental
Æsthetic, p. 35.
[58] _Critique_; Transcendental Logic, p. 80.
[59] These words were written long before Dr. Alan McLane Hamilton
testified, in the Surrogate's Court, (New York City, Feb. 18th, 1901),
that sincere Christian Scientists are afflicted with a form of insane
delusion.
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