Editorial January 16, 1904 Issue

The Intangibility of Matter

The world of scientific research has frequently been called upon to readjust its theories about matter and a material universe, but scarcely ever to such an extent as must follow the acceptance of Professor Ramsey's discovery that the elements can be changed one into another. This discovery, and Professor Lodge's declaration that matter, after all, is only the weapon and vehicle of the mind has caused the Boston Journal to ask whether Mrs. Eddy's views about matter are not now verified by science, and to say that "this new theory seems to be a scientific interpretation of the position long taken by the Christian Scientists."

The seriousness with which our contemporary propounds its question and announces its conclusion proves that Mrs. Eddy's postulate, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" (Science and Health, p. 468), is so startling to the twentieth century as it was to the last quarter of the nineteenth. The breadth of view of this editor is in marked contrast to the attitude of those critics of Christian Science who have been much disturbed by what they have looked upon as Mrs. Eddy's unwarranted interference with the substantiality and reality of matter. We fear that those critics who have embarked so eagerly in the good craft "Matter," will soon realize that they are in a leaky boat and out of sight of land if discoveries such as that of Professor Ramsey continue to startle the scientific world.

The trend of modern scientific opinion and experiment has all been away from a belief in the substantial entity of matter, and we may therefore expect to hear less and less about "Mrs. Eddy's strange and illogical ideas" on the subject, but that does not mean that the world has grasped the full import of her teaching about Mind and matter; the former of which she defines in part as "the one God; not that which is in man, but the divine Principle, or God, of whom man is the full and perfect expression," and the latter in part as "that of which immortal Mind takes no cognizance; that which mortal mind sees, feels, hears, tastes, and smells only in belief" (Science and Health, p. 591).

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