Article May 23, 1914 Issue

A recent article on healing by suggestion raises many...

Frederick Dixon—Aldershot, England

Camberley News

A recent article on healing by suggestion raises many points of great interest. I should not, however, ask you to permit me to refer to it, were it not for its references to Christian Science. These references are extremely kind ones, but Christian Science. is so far removed from healing by suggestion that I should like to make the difference clear, and to show why Christian Scientists do not believe in and cannot support any such method. The writer points out very exactly and very truly the enormous power exercised by the human mind over the body. In doing this he is, of course, merely alluding to a fact which has been common knowledge, especially in the East, for untold centuries. The human body, it is beginning to be more admitted, is nothing but the subjective conditon of the human mind; therefore, if the human mind, as hge says, determines to awaken itself at a certain hour, the body naturally responds to this determination. It would seem to follow from this that the power of healing lies also in the human mind, but the fact that the body is manifesting sickness is really an indication that the human mind itself is holding the belief of sickness; therefore, in order that the body may be healed, the human mind must be healed first.

Now, what is going to heal the human mind? Not willpower, which is an expression of the human mind, nor the human mind itself, which has accepted the belief of sickness. The Romans, with full-blooded material-mindedness, had a proverb, Mens sana in corpore sano. They believed that a healthy mind was the result of a healthy body, and consequently devoted their attention to the culture of the body. Really, as natural science has come to see, this was putting the cart before the horse. The Greeks of Plato's academia would have put it differently, Corpus sanum in menta sana, a healthy body in a healthy mind, for as Professor Symonds and the whole race of idealistic philosophers would state it today, the body is contained inthe mind, and not the mind in the body.

The philosophy of Huxley was a compromise between the philosophy of Locke, itself derived from Aristotle, and the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley, in turn derived from Plato; but he declared that if he were to be driven to take sides either way, he would be compelled to associate himself with Berkeley and the idealists rather than with Locke and the materialists. The weakness of the purely idealistic philosophy, Huxley picked out in the phrase that it must end in "undiluted pantheism." In plain English, it made., the first cause, or God, responsible for and conscious of the evil and sickness inthe human mind, which was in turn manifested in the subjective condition of that mind, namely, the body. This meant that you had to proceed to cure evil with evil, and sickness with a knowledge of sickness, a fact of which the writer of the Jehovistic document of the book of Genesis was perfectly conscious when he spoke of the fruit of "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," and declared that the eating of that fruit would produce death. The conclusion of the Hebrew writer is a tolerably obvious one. If the divine consciousness really was conscious of good and evil, believed in life and death, then the death of phenomena could be only a matter of time. and eternal life would be an impossibility. The tree of life, the writer insisted, stood in the midst of the garden, and so the allegory plainly pointed to some other solution of the great problem of evil.

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