It alone explains the possibility alike of disease and of cure.
Neither for science--that is, in the purely mechanical manner of
regarding the living being--nor for faith--that is, where living beings
are represented as endowed with soul--is disease--and therewith cure--a
conceivability. As well to a thing divine as to a purely mechanical
fall, disease were an unattainable capability. _Man_ only can fall
ill--the man whom the Buddha points out to us, the man who through
and through is a combustion, an alimentation-process, with whom at
every moment of his existence energy and material stand in mutual
functional dependence each upon the other. Correspondingly, it is only
in a process thus constituted that the fact of cure is capable of
explanation.
By the term _cure_ I understand the fact that a single incitation
develops a reaction which no longer stands in any kind of working
relationship to the original impulse, but goes on developing itself
as a self-acting increase. Such a proceeding is possible neither with
a purely mechanical process of compensation nor yet with a “force in
itself.” It is only possible there where an energy and its material
stand in a relation of mutual functional dependence.
The fact also that diseases permit of being affected by the power
of the mind, by thought, is possible of explanation only where an
individual energy and its material stand in a relationship of mutual
dependence.
All the numberless instances of the influence of the mind over
the body, of the body over the mind; all our “moods” of good and
ill-humour; further, the _acquisition of habits_ and the physical
necessity of sleep, are explicable only in the Buddha-thought.