Article January 31, 1914 Issue

In a recent issue, under the heading "Is Seeing Believing?"...

Frederick Dixon—Birmingham, England

Birmingham Weekly Post

In a recent issue, under the heading "Is Seeing Believing?" is discussed in a brief note the teachings of Christian Science and Buddhism with respect to the unreality of material phenomena. As the point of view of these two teachings is so fundamentally different, permit me to draw attention to it. Seeing ceased to be believing to the thinker very many centuries ago. The Eastern philosophers discounted it, and though their Western successors, with an adherence as they fondly imagined to that blessed word "practical," for a time decided in favor of the evidence of the senses, they have gradually been forced to accept an idealistic for a materialistic basis, with the result that Sir Oliver Lodge tells us today that a walking-stick is no more than a quantity of disconnected electrons moving at a tremendous speed.

If we leave out the medieval conceptualists, the first man who familiarized the public in this country with the idea of the unreality of matter was Bishop Berkeley. Of course the discovery that the earth was a globe and not a plane, and that the earth circles round the sun instead of the sun round the earth, had previously caused men to realize that things were not exactly what they seemed. Nevertheless, it was reserved for the Bishop of Cloyne to reduce material phenomena to a mental concept. As has been said, there was nothing new in this. All these theories, however, welded the spiritual and the material together in an indissoluble mass. It was reserved for Mrs. Eddy, in the nineteenth century, to insist that spiritual idealism was something different from this, and to point to the gospel as the text-book of spiritual science.

The illustration used by your contributor, that the Buddhist insists that the dream of the sleeper is as real as the dream of the man who is awake, scarcely does justice to the philosophy indicated. Ultimately, however, Buddhism, like Western idealism, makes spirit dependent on matter, so that in all these teachings spirit, in the words of a well-known churchman of today, becomes the ultimate of matter. This is what Christian Science so strenuously denies. The only reality, Mrs. Eddy insists, is God and the spiritual universe. Evil and the material universe are, scientifically speaking, unreal, and are neither dependent on nor connected with the spiritual reality. Spinoza got rid of evil by making evil good. The Vedantists got rid of it by describing it as Maya, or illusion; but they proceeded to make this Maya just as real as Bishop Berkeley's matter, by joining it to "the Supreme Self" as the producer of the cosmic soul.

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