Christian science has a considerable group of authorized publications
and a well-conducted department of publicity. Its public propaganda is
carried on by means of occasional lectures, always extremely well
advertised and through its reading rooms and periodicals. Its
unadvertised propaganda is carried on, naturally, by its adherents.
Every instance of obscure or protracted illness offers it an opportunity
and such opportunities are by no means neglected. But the supreme
authority in Christian Science is Mary Baker Eddy's work "Science and
Health." This is read at every Sunday service and is the basis of all
lectures and explanatory advertisements. In general its exponents do not
substantially depart from the teachings of its book, nor, such is the
discipline of the cult, do they dare to. There are doubtless such
modifications of its more extreme and impossible contentions as every
religion of authority experiences. Christian Science cannot remain
unaffected by discussion and the larger movements of thought. But it has
not as yet markedly departed from the doctrines of its founder and must
thereby be judged.
The book in its final form represents a considerable evolution. The
comparison of successive editions reveals an astonishing amount of
matter which has been discarded, although there has been no real
modification of its fundamental principles. References to malicious
animal magnetism which fill a large place in the earlier editions, are
almost wholly wanting in the last, and there has been a decided progress
toward a relative simplicity of statements. The book is doubtless much
in debt to Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser, Mr. Wiggins, who brought to the
revision of Mrs. Eddy's writings a conscientious fidelity. One needs to
stand a good ways back from the book itself in order at all to get any
balanced view of its philosophy but, so seen, its fundamentals are
almost unexpectedly simple.
_Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, a Religion and a System of
Healing; General Conditions Which Have Lent it Power_
Christian Science is offered as a philosophy, a theology, a religion and
a method for the practical conduct of life and it needs to be considered
under each of these four heads. It demands also for any proper
understanding of it the backgrounds of Mrs. Eddy's peculiar temperament
and checkered history. It is a growth. For her fundamentals Mrs. Eddy
is, beyond reasonable debate, in debt to Quimby and in some ways
Quimby's original insights have suffered at her hands. None the less, in
its final form "Science and Health" is what Mrs. Eddy has made it and it
is what it is because she was what she was. She shared with her own
generation an absorbing interest in fundamental theological problems.
She inherited a religion which has reduced the whole of life to rigid
and on the whole too narrow theological formulae. She was not able to fit
her experience into the formula which her faith supplied and yet, on the
other hand, her faith exercised a controlling influence over her life.
She was in a small and pathetic way a kind of nineteenth century Job
grappling with the old, old question given sin and, above all, pain and
suffering to find God. She could not adjust either Divine love or a just
Divine sovereignty to what she herself had been called upon to bear. A
natural tendency toward the occult and the desperate willingness of the
hopelessly sick to try anything which promises a cure, led her in many
directions. So much her biography explains.
Quimby was the first teacher she found whose system seemed to offer any
key at all to the intellectual and spiritual puzzle in which she found
herself and when his system seemed to be proved for her by her recovery
from a chronic abnormal state, she thereafter followed and elaborated
what he suggested. Here a certain natural shrewdness and ingenuity of
mind stood her in good stead. She was helped by her own ignorances and
limitations. If she had been a trained thinker, familiar with a wide
range of philosophic speculation, she would never have dared write so
dogmatically; if she had been a great philosopher with the philosopher's
inclusive vision, she would never have dared build so much on
foundations so narrow.
Mrs. Eddy was, unconsciously to herself, a type. She thought and felt
for multitudes of perplexed people unable to reconcile the more trying
experiences of life with what faith they had in the love and goodness of
God, unable on the other side to find the love and goodness of God in
the wide sweep of law and the orderly sequence of cause and effect, and
incapable under any circumstances of the patient analysis needed to
trace to all their sources the threads of their strangely mingled webs
of life; impressionable folk under the spell of words; speculative; at
once credulous and skeptical; intellectually alert enough to want to do
their own thinking and not intellectually disciplined enough to do it
well; persuaded that the Bible has both a message and authority and
unable to find in their traditional interpretation of it either a
satisfying message or an adequately directing authority; impatient of
discipline and pathetically eager for some short cut to happiness and
well-being. In a very signal way Mrs. Eddy has spoken and written for
this type particularly in American life. Her very style a liability as
it is, when tested by either logic or the accepted standards of good
writing, has, nevertheless, been an asset with those who have made her
their prophetess.
The secret of Mrs. Eddy's power and the power of her system after her is
most largely in her essential intellectual and spiritual kinship with
such a temper and intellectual status as this, but she possessed also a
real measure of creative capacity, a marked reach of speculative power,
rare shrewdness and a masterful temper. Mrs. Eddy believed herself to
have found her system in the Old and New Testaments--but she did not.
She gradually built it up out of the suggestions which had been given
her to begin with; she gave it colour and direction from her own
experiences; she proved it to her own satisfaction in the healings which
seemed to result from it, then fitted it all as best she could into the
framework of her inherited Christian faith and read its meanings back
into the Scriptures. It is a pseudo-philosophy pseudo-Christianized (if
one may use the word) by a curious combination of ingenuity, devotion,
main strength and even awkwardness. And though Christian Science is
carrying on to-day as a religion rather than as either a philosophy or a
system of healing, it will stand or fall on the intellectual side as a
philosophy and not as a religion.
_The Philosophic Bases of Christian Science_
It is professedly an idealistic monism based on carefully selected facts
and depending for its proof upon certain results in the experience of
those who accept it. An idealism because there is for Mrs. Eddy no
reality save in mind, a monism because there is for Mrs. Eddy only one
reality and that is God. For a definition of God she offers only
synonyms and affirmations though here perhaps she follows only the usual
procedure of theology. God is divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul,
Spirit, Mind--and all these capitalized, for it makes a vast difference
in the philosophy of Christian Science whether such familiar words as
these are spelled with a capital letter or not. It would be possible
from Mrs. Eddy's own words to pretty effectually prove what has been
more than once claimed: that Christian Science does not offer a personal
God, but all our terminology in this region is necessarily somewhat
loose, though hers is excessively so. Some of her definitions of God are
as personal as the Westminster Catechism or the Thirty-nine Articles.
The writer believes, however, after such dispassionate consideration of
the philosophy of Christian Science as he is able to give, that it would
make absolutely no difference in its philosophic basis whether God were
conceived as a person or not. If the God of Christian Science be taken
merely as the exaltation of an abstract idealism or a philosophic
Absolute everything would be secured which is otherwise secured.
Up to a certain point Christian Science marches with other idealistic
systems. From Plato down we have had philosophers a plenty, who have
sought to build for us a universe whose only realities are mind and its
attributes, or perhaps more technically, consciousness and its content.
It is truly a difficult enough matter to relate the world without and
the world within, once we begin thinking about it (though happily and in
the practical conduct of life this is not so hard as the philosophers
make out, otherwise we should be in a hopeless state), and it is natural
enough for one type of mind to simplify the problem by making the world
within the only world. Nor have there been wanting those who have sought
to reduce everything to a single reality whether matter or mind, and
ever since we have had theology at all a perplexed humanity has been
seeking to reconcile the goodness and the power of God with the sin and
sorrow of our troubled world.
But Christian Science parts company soon enough with this great
fellowship of dreamers and philosophers and takes its own line. It
affirms consciousness and its content to be the only reality; it affirms
the divine Mind to be the ultimate and all-conditioning reality; it
affirms love and goodness to be the ultimate qualities of the divine
Mind, but it meets the problem of sin and evil by denying them any
reality at all. (Here it is in more or less accord with certain forms of
mysticism.) But even as Christian Science cuts this Gordian knot it
creates for itself another set of difficulties and involves itself in
those contradictions which will eventually be the undoing of it as a
philosophy.
_It Undertakes to Solve the Problem of Evil. Contrasted Solutions_
What Christian Science is seeking is an ideal order with a content of
unqualified good and it secures this by denying the reality of every
aspect of experience which either challenges or contradicts its own
idealism. What is distinctive, then, in Christian Science is not its
affirmations but its denials. All systems of philosophic idealism face
practically the same problem and offer various solutions. They most
commonly resolve evil of every sort--and evil is here used in so wide a
way as to include sin and pain and sorrow--into an ultimate good.
Evil is thus an "unripe good," one stage in a process of evolution
which, when it has had its perfect and all-transforming way, will reveal
both moral and physical evil to have been no evil at all but simply
aspects of life, trying enough at the time and puzzling enough when
taken by themselves, but having their own distinct and contributory
value when considered in their relation to the final whole. Such an
approach as this does not in any wise diminish for the individual either
the reality of pain or the unhappy consequences of sin, but it does ask
him to judge the wisdom and love of God not by their passing phases but
by their outcome in the wealth and worth of character.
Robert Browning sang this sturdily through a long generation riding down
its difficulties by the sheer force of an unconquerable optimism and
subduing argument to lyric passion.
"The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"
Others affirm the self-limitation of God.[30] In His respect for that
human freedom which is the basis of self-regulated personal action and
therefore an essential condition of character, He arrests Himself, as it
were, upon the threshold of human personality and commits His children
to a moral struggle justifying the inevitable incidents of moral defeat
by the greatness of the ends to be attained. A vast deal of what we call
evil--broadening evil to include not only moral defeat but also pain--is
either a consequence or a by-product of what Henry Churchill King calls
the fight for character. Such a solution as this is consistent with the
love of God and the moral order; whether it is consistent with a
thoroughgoing monism or not is another question. William James doubted
it and so frankly adopted Pluralism--which is perhaps just a way of
saying that we cannot reconcile the contending forces in our world order
with one over-all-controlling power--as his solution of the problem.
[Footnote 30: Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive Spiritual
Monism and Christian Theism.]
Josiah Royce has valiantly maintained, through long and subtle argument,
the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. "All
finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view
the Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anything
that can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned,
and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in its
entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard sayings
are the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion."[31] He
finds the root of evil in the dissatisfaction of the finite will--a
dissatisfaction which on the other hand is the secret of the eventual
triumph of good.
[Footnote 31: "The World and the Individual," Royce, Vol. II, Chap.
9--passim.]
We suffer also through our involution with "the interests and ideals of
vast realms of other conscious and finite lives whose dissatisfactions
become part of each individual man's life when the man concerned cannot
at present see how or why his own ideals are such as to make these
dissatisfactions his fate." We suffer also through our associations with
nature, none the less "this very presence of evil in the temporal order
is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order." He dismisses
definitely, in an argument still to be quoted, the conclusion of the
mystic that an "experience of evil is an experience of unreality ... an
illusion, a dream, a deceit" and concludes: "In brief, then, nowhere in
Time is perfection to be found. Our comfort lies in the knowledge of the
Eternal. Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most enduring of
temporal joys, the consciousness that makes us delight to share the
world's grave glories and to take part in its divine sorrows,--sure that
these sorrows are the means of the eternal triumph, and that these
glories are the treasures of the house of God. When once this comfort
comes home to us, we can run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.
For our temporal life is the very expression of the eternal triumph."
One may gravely question whether philosophy has ever so completely made
out its case as Professor Royce thinks. He is affirming as the reasoned
conclusion of philosophy what is rather a faith than a demonstration,
but none the less, all honest thinking has hitherto been brave enough to
recognize the reality of evil and to test the power of God and His love
and goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion of
present sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growing
through pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a real
contribution to character and of so rising above sin as to make
penitence and confession and the struggle for good and the achievement
of it also a contribution to character. So St. Paul assures us that all
things work together for good for those that love God. "The
willingness," says Hocking, "to confront every evil, in ourselves and
outside ourselves, with the blunt, factual conscience of Science;
willingness to pay the full causal price for the removal of the blemish;
this kind of integrity can never be dispensed with in any optimistic
program."[32]
[Footnote 32: "The Meaning of God in Human Experience," p. 175.]
Sir Henry Jones takes the same line. "The first requisite for the
solution of the contradiction between the demand of religion for the
perfection of God, and therefore the final and complete victory of the
good in the other, is the honest admission that the contradiction is
there, and inevitable; though possibly, like other contradictions, it is
there only to be solved."[33]
[Footnote 33: "A Faith that Enquires," p. 45.]
_The Divine Mind and Mortal Mind_
Christian Science solves this problem, as has been said, by denying the
reality of evil, but since we have an abundance of testimony to pain and
sickness, Mrs. Eddy goes a step farther. She denies the reality of the
testimony of the senses wherever pain and sickness are concerned.[34]
(Mrs. Eddy's denial of the reality of sin is hardly parallel to her
denial of the reality of physical ills.) And here the word comes in
which is made to carry a heavier load than any one poor word was ever
burdened with before. All that is involved in the recognition of
physical ills and indeed all that is involved in the recognition of the
material side of existence is error. (Once fairly on her road Mrs. Eddy
makes a clean sweep of whatever stands in her way.) What one may call
the whole shadowed side of experience is not only ignored, it is denied
and yet before it can be explained away it has to be explained. It is,
in brief, for Mrs. Eddy and her followers the creation of mortal mind.
Mortal mind, she says, "is nothing claiming to be something; mythology;
error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense; ... that
which neither exists in science nor can be recognized by the spiritual
sense; sin; sickness; death."[35]
[Footnote 34: "Science and Health," last edition, pp. 108, 120, 293,
488.]
[Footnote 35: _Ibid._, p. 591.]
Mortal mind is that side of us which accepts our entanglement in the
facts and forces of the world order and upon mortal mind so vaguely
conceived Mrs. Eddy throws the whole burden of responsibility for all
the unhappy aspects of experience and conditioning circumstances. She
gives it a surprising range of creative power. It has created
everything Mrs. Eddy does not like or believe in. In other words, there
is not one reality but two, one the reality of well-being, the other the
reality of unhappiness and suffering, but according to Mrs. Eddy the
first reality is the only real reality, the second is an unreal reality
which we ourselves create through false beliefs and which we may escape
at any moment by simply shifting the center of our creative idealism.
Mrs. Eddy makes what she means by mortal mind reasonably clear through
endless repetition and some analysis, but she never for a moment
accounts for its existence. It is no creation of what she calls the
divine Mind; indeed she says in substance that God is not conscious of
it at all; it lies entirely outside the range of His knowledge. (Page
243.)
God is Good. Since He is good He cannot have created nor be responsible
for, nor even recognize pain, sorrow or suffering. "The Divine Mind
cannot suffer" (page 108, also page 335), "is not responsible for
physical and moral disasters" (page 119). God did not create matter (the
Father mind is not the father of matter) (page 257), for matter means
pain and death, nor do such things as these belong in any way to the
order of the Divine Mind. They have no admitted reality in Mrs. Eddy's
scheme of a true idealism. Man is "God's spiritual idea" and since he
belongs by right to an order in which there is neither sin nor sorrow
nor death, such things as these have no reality for him save as he
admits them. What really admits them is mortal mind, the agent of
another system of Belief in which humanity has in some way, which is
never really explained, become entangled, and we may apparently escape
from the one order to the other simply by a change in our beliefs. For
all the shadowed side of life has reality only as we accept or believe
in it; directly we cease to believe in it or deny it it ceases to be.
It is, as near as one can make out, a myth, an illusion, whose
beginnings are lost in obscurity and which, for the want of the
revelation vouchsafed through her, has been continued from age to age by
the untaught or the misled. For example, Arsenic is not a poison, so we
are told again and again. It is only a poison because people think it
is;[36] it began to be a poison only because people thought it was, it
continues to be a poison only because the majority of people think it is
now and, such is the subtle and far-reaching influence of mind upon
mind, it will continue to be a poison as long as any one continues to
believe it to be. Directly we all believe that Arsenic is not a poison
it will be no poison. Poisons, that is, are the creation of mortal mind.
Pain is pain only through the same mistaken belief in the reality of it.
"By universal consent mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind
mortals to sickness, sin and death." And so on at great length and
almost endless repetition.
[Footnote 36: Page 178.]
_The Essential Limitations of Mrs. Eddy's System_
Since matter conditions us who were born to be unconditioned and since
matter is apparently the root of so many ills, the seat of so many
pains, matter goes with the rest. Mrs. Eddy is not always consistent in
her consideration of matter; sometimes she confines herself to saying
that there is neither sensation nor life in matter--which may be true
enough save as matter both affords the material for sensation and
conditions its forms, which is an immense qualification,--but again and
again she calls matter an illusion. Consistently the laws of physics and
chemistry should disappear with the laws of hygiene and medicine, but
Mrs. Eddy does not go so far as that though it would be difficult to
find a logical stopping place once you have taken this line. Mortal mind
is apparently the source of all these illusions.
Mrs. Eddy's disposal of matter, along with her constant return to its
misleading mastery in experience is an outstanding aspect of her book.
The writer is inclined to believe that Mrs. Eddy's formula: "There is
... no matter in life and no life in matter," is an echo of Tyndall's
famous utterance--made about the time she was working with her
system--that he found "in matter the promise and potency of all life."
There is surprisingly little reference in "Science and Health" to
philosophic or scientific sources. Cutter's physiology is quoted in some
editions--an old textbook which the writer remembers to have found among
his mother's school books. There are a few references to popular
astronomy, but in general for Mrs. Eddy modern science does not exist
except in the most general way as the erroneous expression of error and
always with a small "s" as against the capital "S" of her own system.
Nor does she show any knowledge of other philosophic idealisms nor any
acquaintance with any solution of the problems she was facing save the
commonplaces of evangelical orthodoxy. "Science and Health" knows
nothing also of any medical science save the empirical methods of the
medical science of 1860 and 1870.
But she cannot have been wholly uninfluenced--being a woman of an alert
mind--by the controversy which, in the seventies and eighties, was
raging about a pretty crass and literal materialism, and her writings
probably reflect--with a good deal of indirection--that controversy.
Here is a possible key to a good many things which are otherwise
puzzling enough. She is, in her own fashion, the defender of an
idealistic interpretation of reality and experience. Now all idealistic
systems have had to dispose of matter in some way. In general idealists
find in matter only the reflection in consciousness of the material
which sense experience supplies, and since the raw material is in every
way so different from the mental reflection, the idealist may defend his
position plausibly in assuming matter to be, in its phenomenal aspects,
really the creation of thought. But he must account for the persistency
of it and the consistency of experience so conditioned. He does this by
assuming the whole interrelated order to be held, as it were, in
solution, in some larger system of thought which really supplies for us
our environment and if he be both devout and consistent he calls this
the thought God.[37] In this way he solves his problem--at least to his
own satisfaction--and even supplies a basis for Theistic faith. But he
does not deny the working reality of his so-called material experiences
nor does he, like Mrs. Eddy, accept one aspect of this experience and
deny the other. This is philosophically impossible.
[Footnote 37: So Royce in "The World and the Individual."]
A thoroughgoing theistic monism must find in matter some aspect or other
of the self-revelation of God. It may be hard pressed to discover just
how the psychical is "stepped down" to the physical. (That is the
essential difficulty in all Creationism.) But something must be assumed
to get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much in
that resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuous
and imponderable forms--which is the tendency of modern science--to
render this assumption less difficult to the rational imagination than
perhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements in
matter have become electrons and the electron is conceived as a strain
in a magnetic field and thus the
"Cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which is inherent,"
become the projection into sensibly apprehended form of the flux of an
infinite and eternal energy, it is not hard to define that energy in
terms of a divine will. Indeed it is hard not to do just that. But there
is no place in such a resolution as this for the conclusions of "Science
and Health."
Or we may accept in one form or another a dualism in which the
practical mind is generally content to rest. According to this point of
view we have to do with a reality which may be known under two aspects.
It is the chemical action and interaction of elements--and the mind
which measures and combines them; it is the physical action and
interaction of force--and the mind which directs the process.
Biologically "the living creature gives an account of itself in two
ways. It can know itself as something extended and intricately built up,
burning away, moving, throbbing; it can also know itself as the seat of
sensation, perceptions, feelings, wishes, thoughts. But there is not one
process, thinking, and another process, cerebral metabolism (vital
processes in nerve-cells); there is a psycho-physical life--a reality
which we know under two aspects. Cerebral control and mental activity
are, on this view, different aspects of one natural occurrence. What we
have to do with is the unified life of a psycho-physical being, a
body-mind or mind-body."[38] In short there is no philosophy or science
outside the covers of her own book to which Mrs. Eddy may turn for
support and though this does not prove the case against her--she might
be right and the whole disciplined thought of her time be wrong--this
latter supposition is so improbable as to rule it out of court.
[Footnote 38: J.A. Thomson, "The Outline of Science," p. 548.]
The materialism against which she contends has ceased to exist. The
matter which she denies does not exist in the sense of her denial. There
was, even when she was writing, a line of which she was apparently
wholly ignorant which has since been immensely developed, and of all
this there is naturally no reflection at all in her work. It is more
hopelessly out of touch with the laborious and strongly established
conclusions of modern thought in every field than the first chapters of
Genesis for there one may, at least, substitute the science of to-day
for the science of 3,000 years ago and still retain the enduring
insights of the faith then voiced, but there is no possible
accommodation of "Science and Health" to either the science or the
philosophy of the twentieth century. It must be left to a consistent
Christian Scientist to reconcile his gospel with the freer movements of
the world of which he is still a citizen--though perhaps this also might
be urged against a deal of contemporaneous Christian faith--but it is
all an arresting testimony to the power of the human mind to organize
itself in compartments between which there is no communication.
_Experience and Life_
Beyond all this is the fact of which "Science and Health" takes no
account--the conditioning of conscious life and working experience by
its material environment however conceived. This is true of every phase
of life and all our later emphasis upon the power of the mind in one
direction and another to escape this conditioning scarcely affects the
massive reality of it. Christian Science makes no attempt at all to
escape this--save in the region of physical health--or else it provides
an alibi in the phrase, "I have not demonstrated in that region yet."
But it does not thus escape the limitation imposed upon us all and if
we may dare for a moment to be dogmatic, it never will. At the best we
live in a give and take and if, through discipline and widening
knowledge, we may push back a little the frontiers which limit us, and
assert the supremacy of soul over the material with which it is so
intimately associated, we do even this slowly and at great cost and
always in conformity with the laws of the matter we master.
There is a body of evidence here which can no more be ignored than
gravitation, and we best dispose of association of personality with the
material fabric of the body and the world of which it is a part, not by
denying their mutual interdependence but by discovering therein the laws
and methods of an infinite wisdom. Here are ministries through which we
come to consciousness of ourselves, here are materials upon which we
exercise our power, here are realities which hold us fast to normal and
intelligible lives, here are masters whose rule is kind and servants
whose obediences empower us. They condition our happinesses as well as
our unhappinesses and supply for us the strings of that harp of the
senses upon which the music of life is played. Life really gains its
spiritual content through the action and interaction of the aspiring
self upon its environment--whether that environment be intimate as the
protest of a disturbed bodily cell or remote as Orion and the
Pleiades.[39] The very words which Mrs. Eddy uses would be idle if this
were not so and though a thoroughgoing defender of her system may read
into its lines a permission for all this, the fundamentals of her system
deny it.
[Footnote 39: "And I am inclined to think that the error of forgetting
that spirit in order to be real or that principles, whether of morality,
religion or knowledge, must be exemplified in temporal facts, is a no
less disastrous error than that of the sciences which have not learned
that the natural, when all the meaning of it is set free, blossoms into
the spiritual like the tree into flower. Religion and philosophy and
science also have yet to learn more fully that all which can possibly
concern man, occupy his intelligence or engage his will, lies at the
point of intersection of the natural and spiritual."--"A Faith that
Enquires," p. 27.]
Christian Science breaks down both philosophically and practically just
here. It is none the less a dualism because it denies that it is. It
confronts not one but two ranges of reality; it gains nothing by making
mortal mind the villain in the play. It is compelled to admit the
existence of the reality which it denies, even in the fact of denying
it. What we deny exists for us--we could not otherwise deny it. Royce
has put all this clearly, strongly, finally. "The mystic first denies
that evil is real. He is asked why, then, evil seems to exist. He
replies that this is our finite error. The finite error itself hereupon
becomes, as the source of all our woes, an evil. But no evil is real,
hence no error can be real, hence we do not really err even if we
suppose that evil is real. Here we return to our starting point and
could only hope to escape by asserting that it is an error to assert
that we really err or that we really believe error to be real, and with
a process thus begun there is indeed no end, nor at any stage in this
process is there consistency."[40] All this is subtle enough, but if we
are to make our world by thinking and unthinking it, all this is
unescapably true.
[Footnote 40: "The World and the Individual," Vol. II, p. 394.]
When, moreover, you have reduced one range of experience to illusion
there is absolutely nothing to save the rest. If evil is error and error
evil and the belief that evil is an illusion is itself an illusion what
is there to guarantee the reality of good? The sword with which Mrs.
Eddy cut the knot of the problem of evil is two-edged. If the optimist
denies evil for the sake of good and points for proof to the solid
coherency of the happier side of life, the pessimist may as justly deny
good for the sake of evil and point for proof to the solid coherency of
the sadder side of life; he will have no trouble in finding his facts.
If sickness is a dream then health is a dream as well. Once we have
taken illusion for a guide there is no stopping until everything is
illusion. The Eastern mystic who went this road long before Mrs. Eddy
and who thought it through with a searching subtleness of which she was
incapable, reached the only logical conclusion. All experience is
illusion, entire detachment from action is the only wisdom, and
absorption in an unconscious something which only escapes being nothing
is our appointed destiny:
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of,
And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
_Sense-Testimony Cannot Be Accepted for Health and Denied for Sickness_
Christian Science, then, is not monism, it is rather a dualism; it
confronts not one but two ranges of reality and it is compelled to admit
the existence of the reality which it denies, even the fact of denying
it, for it is a philosophical axiom that what we deny exists for us--we
could not otherwise deny it. Denial is the recognition of reality just
as much as affirmation. To repeat, it is this continuous interwoven
process of trying to reconcile the one-sided idealism of Christian
Science with the necessity of its argument and the facts of life which
gives to "Science and Health" what one may call its strangely bifocal
character, though indeed this is a somewhat misleading figure. One has
the same experience in reading the book that one has in trying to read
through glasses which are out of focus; you are always just seeing and
just missing because Mrs. Eddy herself is always just seeing and just
missing a really great truth.
This fundamental inconsistency penetrates the whole system even down to
its practical applications. Christian Science denies the testimony of
the senses as to sickness and yet accepts them as to health. It goes
further than this, it accepts the testimony of the senses of other
people--physicians, for example, in accepting their diagnosis. The
edition of "Science and Health" published in 1918 offers in chapter
eighteen a hundred pages of testimonials sent in by those who have in
various ways been helped by their faith. These letters are shot through
and through with a recognition of the testimony of the senses which no
explanation can possibly explain away. "I was afflicted with a fibroid
tumour which weighed not less than fifty pounds, attended by a
continuous hemorrhage for eleven years." If the senses have any language
at all, this is their language. A growth cannot be known as a fibroid
tumour without sense testimony, nor its weight estimated without sense
testimony, nor a continuous hemorrhage be recorded, or its cessation
known without sense testimony, nor can epilepsy be diagnosed, nor
bilious attacks recognized without sense testimony. On page 606 a
grateful disciple bears witness to the healing of a broken arm,
testimony to said healing being demonstrated by a visit to a physician's
office "where they were experimenting with an X-ray machine. The doctor
pointed out the place as being slightly thicker at that part, like a
piece of steel that had been welded." In other words, Christian Science
cannot make out its case without the recognition of the veracity of a
sense testimony, whose truth its philosophy denies.
Mrs. Eddy seems to dismiss all this in one brief paragraph. "Is a man
sick if the material senses indicate that he is in good health? No, for
matter can make no conditions for man. And is he well if the senses say
he is sick? Yes, he is well in Science, in which health is normal and
disease is abnormal."[41] If Mrs. Eddy and her followers believe so
specious a statement as that, to set them free from an inconsistency
which is central in their whole contention, they are welcome to their
belief, but the inconsistency still remains. You can go far by using
words in a Pickwickian sense but there is a limit. A consistent idealism
is philosophically possible, but it must be a far more inclusive and
deeply reasoned idealism than Christian Science. The most thoroughgoing
idealisms have accepted the testimony of the senses as a part of the
necessary conduct of life as now conditioned. Anything else would reduce
us to unspeakable confusion, empty experience of its content, dissolve
all the contacts of life and halt us in our tracks for we cannot take a
step safely without the testimony of the senses and any scheme of things
which seeks to distinguish between the varying validities of sense
testimony, accepting only the evidence of the senses for health and
well-being and denying the dependability of whatever else they register,
is simply an immense caprice which breaks down under any examination.
[Footnote 41: Page 120. It is only fair to say that Mrs. Eddy is
hampered by her own want of clear statement. The phrase (so often used
in "Science and Health") "in Science" is probably in her mind equivalent
to "in the ideal order" and if Mrs. Eddy had clearly seen and clearly
stated what she is groping for: that the whole shadowed side of life
belongs to our present world of divided powers and warring forces and
unfinished enterprises, that God has something better for His children
toward which we are being led through the discipline of experience and
that we may therefore seek to conceive and affirm this ideal order and
become its citizens in body, mind and soul, she would have escaped a
perfect web of contradiction and been in line not only with the great
philosophies but with historic Christian faith. But then Christian
Science would not be Christian Science.]
_The Inescapable Reality of Shadowed Experience_
Evil does not cease to be because it is denied. The acceptance of sense
testimony is just as necessary in the region of pain and sickness as in
driving a motorcar down a crowded street and the hypothesis of a
misleading mortal mind, instead of explaining everything, demands itself
an explanation. What Mrs. Eddy calls mortal mind is only the registry of
the dearly bought experience of the race. We began only with the power
to feel, to struggle, to will and to think. We have been blind enough
and stupid enough but we are, after all, not unteachable and out of our
experience and our reflections we have created the whole splendid and
dependable body of human knowledge. What we know about pain is itself
the outcome of all the suffering of our kind. We began with no developed
philosophy nor any presuppositions about anything. Experience reflects
encompassing realities which we are able to escape only as we make their
laws our ministers. We did not give fire the power to burn, we
discovered that only in the school of the touch of flame. We did not
give edged steel the power to cut, we found that out through death and
bleeding wounds. We did not give to poisons their deadly power, our
attitude toward them is simply the outcome of our experience with them.
Conditioned as we are by those laws and forces with which this present
existence of ours is in innumerable ways inextricably interwoven, our
tested and sifted beliefs are only the outcome of an action and
interaction of recipient or creative personality upon its environment
old as human consciousness, and if in all this we have become persuaded
of pain and suffering and shadowed experience, it is only because these
are as real as any elements in experience can possibly be. To attempt
to write them out or deny them out or juggle them out in any kind of way
save in bravely meeting them and humbly being taught by them and in the
full resource of disciplined power getting free from them by removing
the causes which create them, is to cheat ourselves with words, lose
ourselves in shadows which we mistake for light and even if in some
regions we seem to succeed it is only at the cost of what is more bitter
than pain and more deadly than wounds--the loss of mental and spiritual
integrity. This is a price too great to pay for any mere healing.