Article August 24, 1899 Issue

Immortal Mind

Love's work and Love must fit.—Dayton.

with contributions from Paul Washburn

IN the February number of the Independent, on the second page of the contribution under the title, "Mortal Mind," the types print the word bravest where it was the intention of my pen to write the word barest. That clause of the sentence properly should read: "This physical manifestation is, in reality, the barest incident, though an essential and inevitable one, of the recognition of Immortal mind."

Perhaps though, after all, there is not much objection to the word bravest, for it is a brave thing to have good health. A sick mind must produce a sick body; while a healthy mind will inevitably find its expression in a healthy body. There are at least a couple of phases of our conventional religion that strike one as bereft of all congruity. One of them is the serious regard awarded to so-called physical disease. Almost anybody will admit that the body is made from a sort of hash, say bread and butter, or hog and hominy, or beans, as the case may be—diluted or floated with water, coffee, and in some instances with fluids of more vicious reputation. Now no one of these articles in its place on the table has ever probably interpreted to any one a sense of pain in itself. Yet the compound of such foods stowed away in the flesh and blood and distributed from the gray matter of the brain to the nails on one's toes, we immediately endow with such a sense of life as to give it almost unlimited, and at times irresistible, influence over our health and happiness. It was the supreme ridiculousness of this phase of the proposition which drove me to the abandonment of ten years of complacent servitude to that most aristocratic of diseases—nervous prostration. This performance of clothing with entity, or being, as though it was self-existent, that which in itself has no life, is well described in the Christian Science writings as the work of mortal mind. Considered from this standpoint, what we are accustomed to term bodily disease and the things we term evil, are in reality totally unreal, because they get their extension and operation entirely from acknowledgment. The dilettanteism of mortal mind, its affectation of control, of knowledge and supremacy, which takes the form of an artistic delight is, when the facts dawn upon one, as viciously absurd as it is violently impious—and can be but the inevitable product of thrusting out of the mind any adequate recognition of the Infinite mind and our relation thereto.

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