Editorial March 15, 1930 Issue

Substance

Clifford P. Smith

Physics now dissects matter into space and electric charges, positive and negative, called protons and electrons. "If we eliminated all the unfilled space in a man's body and collected his protons and electrons into one mass, the man would be reduced to a speck just visible with a magnifying glass." These are the words of an eminent physicist, Professor A. S. Eddington, on pages 1 and 2 of his book "The Nature of the Physical World," dated 1928.

In the Christian Science view, this striking statement does not affect man at all: matter is not an element of man. Yet, such a dissection of the so-called human body helps to prove that materiality is only material belief or nonspiritual thinking. So also, such a dissection helps to show the illusory nature of what seems to be physical disease. Even when matter is assumed to be something, any bodily condition is mostly space. Then when matter can be regarded as nothing, health is necessarily seen as an inherent condition of Mind.

In effect, Professor Eddington also relates that physics has reduced the entire physical world to shadows and symbols (Introduction, pages xiv, xv). Then he continues thus: "It is difficult to school ourselves to treat the physical world as purely symbolic. We are always relapsing and mixing with the symbols incongruous conceptions taken from the world of consciousness. Untaught by long experience we stretch a hand to grasp the shadow, instead of accepting its shadowy nature."

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