She was middle-aged, and large and bony, and erect, and had an austere
face and a resolute jaw and a Roman beak and was a widow in the third
degree, and her name was Fuller. I was eager to get to business and find
relief, but she was distressingly deliberate. She unpinned and unhooked
and uncoupled her upholsteries one by one, abolished the wrinkles with a
flirt of her hand, and hung the articles up; peeled off her gloves and
disposed of them, got a book out of her hand-bag, then drew a chair to
the bedside, descended into it without hurry and I hung out my tongue.
She said, with pity but without passion:
“Return it to its receptacle. We deal with the mind only, not with its
dumb servants.”
I could not offer my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she
detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative
tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no
use for. Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so
that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence,
she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how I
felt was an abuse of language, a misapplication of terms.
“One does not _feel_” she explained; “there is no such thing as feeling:
therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent is a
contradiction. Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the
mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it.”
“But if it hurts, just the same——”
“It doesn’t. A thing which is unreal cannot exercise the functions of
reality. Pain is unreal; hence, pain cannot hurt.”
In making a sweeping gesture to indicate the act of shooing the illusion
of pain out of the mind, she raked her hand on a pin in her dress, said
“Ouch!” and went tranquilly on with her talk. “You should never allow
yourself to speak of how you feel, nor permit others to ask you how you
are feeling; you should never concede that you are ill, nor permit
others to talk about disease or pain or death or similar non-existences
in your presence. Such talk only encourages the mind to continue its
empty imaginings.”
Just at that point the _Stubenmädchen_ trod on the cat’s tail, and the
cat let fly a frenzy of cat profanity. I asked, with caution:
“Is a cat’s opinion about pain valuable?”
“A cat has no opinion; opinions proceed from mind only; the lower
animals being eternally perishable, have not been granted mind; without
mind, opinion is impossible.”
“She merely _imagined_ she felt a pain—the cat?”
“She cannot imagine a pain, for imagining is an effect of mind; without
mind there is no imagination. A cat has no imagination.”
“Then she had a _real_ pain?”
“I have already told you there is no such _thing_ as real pain.”
“It is strange and interesting. I do wonder what was the matter with the
cat.”
_FROM_ “ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER” (1903)