A SOFT SET OF CRITICS.
We have now learned a little of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy's celestial and
terrestrial biography, as derived from the supramundane novel,
_Retrospection and Introspection_, and some other sources. Bare allusion
has been made to her _Science and Health_. But this, she says, "is my most
important work, containing the complete statement of Christian Science."
The book, as we have seen, came among men--or, more strictly speaking,
among less busy women--in 1875; and a thousand copies, we are told,
comprised the first edition. "The critics," Mrs. Eddy informs us,
pronounced it "wholly original," but a thing that would "never be read."
The foolish "critics"! How little they knew about "originality"! But they
knew still less of Mrs. Eddy's "Spiritual _afflatus_," as she designates
it, in the fervency of which "erudite systems of philosophy" had "melted";
nor did they realize her "divinely appointed mission"; for, in 1891,
_Science and Health_ had reached sixty-two editions. "Then the critics
said" that "Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or certain
German philosophers," had originated Mrs. Eddy's sole and well-monopolized
"Science."[29]
Now if any "critics" ever did really shoot such soft intellectual putty as
that, they ought certainly to have been condemned to the most heroic sort
of mind-healing.
Think of George Berkeley, the most acute, the most logical mind of his
age, standing with both feet on John Locke's "Essay of the Human
Understanding," and attempting to pull himself up into the Infinite by
mouthing the shibboleth that there is no finite!
And David Hume--the bonny skeptic, David--whose keenness brought the
philosophy of his age to a logical standstill, and for the moment broke up
all "metaphysics"! Poor David Hume! In the hands of what a "critic" it
was, who imagined he had ever furnished a speck of meat for such a haggis
as _Science and Health_!
For the moment, let us pass by Mr. Emerson, the Puritan mystic of New
England transcendentalism, who beamed serenely down on mere "critics," and
told them he hoped he "had never said anything that needed to be proved."
But Mrs. Eddy's phrase, "_certain German philosophers_," is one that can
only refer to Immanuel Kant, with his school of followers, who summed up
the pure thinking of the modern world, as Plato and Aristotle summed up
the pure thinking of the ancient world.
History tells us that Kant was a man who discovered the planet Uranus by
mathematics before Herschel found it with a telescope, and who "had
mastered all sciences" to date when he lived. Ripe with the knowledge of
sixty years, he wrote his _Critique of Pure Reason_. This, the most
profound and far-reaching treatise of any age, should have been named "The
Analysis of Mind and Matter, Time and Space"; for such was really Kant's
subject and achievement.
This extraordinary little German professor, Immanuel Kant, was the most
regular and temperate of human beings; but he had a touch of asthma, for
which, before all the medicinal properties of mind-cure were known, he
took daily about a thimble-full of rum. Kant has been frightfully dealt
with by his "critics," the most of whose heads he completely pulverized in
connection with their activity in his behalf. But suppose Herr Professor
Kant could have imagined that any "critic" on earth would ever accuse him
of instigating the philosophy of Mary Baker G. Eddy! In that dread event,
"the sage of Koenigsberg," who once lost the thread of a lecture when a
button he used to finger was cut from his coat, might have been so
disconcerted, so sunk in amazement and despair, as to swallow his whole
bottle of liquor, instead of the twentieth of a gill, and to burn his
_Critique of Pure Reason_ in a fit of _delirium tremens_.
It is well he was tempted into no such catastrophe; for, on getting on a
bit, we shall find that every possible system of "metaphysics," to have
any scientific foundation in modern thought, must refer itself to Kant's
dissection of the universe.