Article August 27, 1910 Issue

Christian Science is not the nonsense which some people...

Frederick Dixon

Cambridge (Eng.) Independent Press

Christian Science is not the nonsense which some people attempt to travesty it as. It is simply the most thoroughgoing idealism ever opposed to materialism. The materialist sums up his belief in the fact that nothing exists but the forces inherent in matter, and the doctors who accept the materialistic standpoint treat their patients just as if they were composed of so many pounds of matter to which mind was incidental. The natural science idealist, on the other hand, maintains that matter is the subjective condition of mind, or, to put it more clearly, that the body is simply a mental concept. Now, if the body is simply a mental concept, it follows absolutely, irresistibly, that the only existence which bacilli can claim is that of a mental concept.

In these circumstances, to give a man drugs or to operate upon him is simply to adopt the clumsiest possible method of convincing the mind. Unlimited ridicule has been poured on Berkeley for making tar-water what Mr. Balfour has termed the universal panacea. Berkeley, however, was as strictly logical as he was illogical. He was logical because, if the mind has to be convinced by the use of a drug, it may as well be convinced by persuading it that tar-water can rid it of its concepts of sickness just as well as by convincing it that you must ring the changes on all the various drugs in the pharmacopæia. He was illogical, inasmuch as it is illogical to tell a man that in order to change his mind it is necessary for him to submit to a physical process. If, as Berkeley said, matter was nothing but the subjective condition of mind, then, in order to change the material concept, what was necessary was a change of mind, and it was ridiculous to attempt to bring this about by physic and not by argument.

The Christian Scientist is a thorough-going idealist, but he differs totally and absolutely from the mental scientist, inasmuch as he declares that the mind which produces sickness is incapable of destroying it. The mental scientist claims that the human mind, in which are the mental germs of sickness, can eradicate those germs and produce health, by some process of suggestion. Now, the human mind supposed to work in this manner was typified by Jesus as a house divided against a house, which he declared could not stand. It contains, in itself, the belief in the power of good and evil, themselves the fruit of the tree, the eating of which the writer of the Jehovistic document of Genesis declared meant death. In plain English, the claim that the human mind can be exerted for good and for evil is the claim that good and evil are coequal powers, and that sometimes one will weigh down the scale and sometimes the other.

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