A History of the New Thought Movement

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A History of the New Thought Movement

by Horatio W. Dresser

First published by Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, 1919

Electronic Edition Published by Cornerstone Publishing, July 2001.
http://horatiodresser.wwwhubs.com/ahotntinx.htm

Chapter 1 - THE NEW AGE

THE Great War came as a vivid reminder that we live in a new age. We began to look back not only to explain the war and find a way to bring it to an end, but to see what tendencies were in process to lead us far beyond it. There were new issues to be met and we needed the new enlightenment to meet them. The war was only one of various signs of a new dispensation. It came not so much to prepare the way as to call attention to truths which we already possessed. The new age had been in process for some time. Dif-ferent ones of us were trying to show in what way it was a new dispensation, what principles were most needed. What the war accomplished for us was to give us a new contrast. As a result we now see clearly that some of the tendencies of the nineteenth century which were most warmly praised are not so prom-ising as we supposed.

We had come to regard the nineteenth century as the age of the special sciences. We looked to science for enlightenment. We enjoyed new inventions without number, such as the steam-engine, the electric telegraph, the telephone, and our life centered more and more about these. But the nation having most to do with preparation for the war was the one which made the greatest use of the special sciences. Modern science was in fact materialized for the benefit of a military party. As a result of our study of the war many of us are now more interested in higher branches of knowledge than in the special sciences. We insist that science is for use, and we reserve the right to say what that use shall be. We have lost interest in science not explicitly employed for moral ends.

Again, we called attention to the nineteenth century with great pride as the age of the philosophy of evo-lution. We put our hopes in that philosophy. We expected it to explain the great mysteries. We wrote history anew, we issued new text-books, and in a thousand ways adapted our thought to the great idea of gradual development. But while the new philosophy accomplished wonders for us in so far as it showed the reign of law, the uniformity of nature, the immanence of all causality, it deprived us of our former belief in the divine purpose. Taken literally, it led us to regard nature as self-operative. We had to work our way back to the divine providence. We realized that evolutionism was simply a new form of materi-alism. We carried forward from the nineteenth century into the twentieth many great problems of life and mind not yet solved. The philosophy of evolution has come to stay, but not even in the form of Bergson's interpretation is it satisfactory.

We also looked upon the nineteenth century as the period of development of idealism. The modern movement, beginning in Germany, spread to England and the United States, and we witnessed a most interesting form of it in our transcendentalism. This movement, in brief, emphasized Thought as the car-dinal principle. It sought to explain all things by reference to this Thought. It found the starting-point as well as the meaning in the Idea, The outward world was regarded as a mere phenomenon in comparison. This movement had permanent contributions to make to our thought. We associate the name of Emerson with its spiritual meanings. But most of its theoretical teachings seem far removed from our practical thought today. We no longer try to spin the world out of the mere web of Thought. We need a new ideal-ism to replace that of Fichte and Hegel. We are suspicious of mere speculation. The idealism of the last century is already mere matter of history.

The nineteenth century was also the epoch of religious liberalism. Throughout the century Unitarianism accomplished a great work. The liberalizing tendencies spread into all denominations. We take many ideas as matters of course nowadays for which the great leaders of the time of Theodore Parker and James Martineau had to contend at the risk of intellectual martyrdom The liberalism of the early part of the century had a destructive work to do before the freer thought of the day could assimilate the teach-ings of modern science and give us our present constructive faith. It requires decided effort on our part today to put ourselves back to the time when narrowing dogmas still ruled the human mind, when it was customary to pray for divine intervention, to believe in miracles as infractions of law, and to draw lines of rigid exclusiveness around the ecclesiastical sect to which one happened to belong. The history of lib-eralism is so comprehensive that it is always a question nowadays what we mean when we use the term. To be liberal is to be of the new age. The real question is, what is the goal of liberalism? The answer which a disciple of the New Thought would give should be understood in the light of a long struggle for the right to employ mental healing, a struggle which went on almost apart, independently of the warfare waged by Unitarianism upon the old doctrines and dogmas.

As in the case of the philosophy of evolution, we have had religious liberalism long enough with us to realize that it has a sting to it. For the less enlightened, the smaller minds among liberals, freedom of re-ligious thought developed according to the tenets of the new or higher criticism imported from Ger-many. Undertaking to explain how the Bible came into being, with the variations and errors of texts, the imperfections of language, the conflict of opinions due to the fact that the books of which the Bible con-sists were brought together by other hands long after the supposed writers flourished, the critics proved too much and exemplified a habit of judging by the letter. Biblical criticism became destructive and had much to do with the weakening of faith still apparent among us. If we say that the new age is the epoch of belief in the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures, we must qualify it by saying that the greater work remains to be done. Devotees of the New Thought have freely interpreted the Bible for themselves. What is needed is a spiritual science of interpretation to offset the destructive work which the age ac-cepted without knowing what it believed.

The great century that has passed also witnessed the coming of spiritism in its modern form. In retro-spect we are now able to say that behind all that was misleading in the new movement there were certain great truths which the world needed. Old ideas of death have been overcame, the spiritual world has been brought nearer, and larger views of the human spirit have been generally accepted. Out of the new interest came psychical research as an endeavor to put the phenomena of the whole field of spiritism on a scientific basis. The results have been meager and slowly attained. But the movement has been educa-tional. Its positive results are discoverable in what we have been led to think. Although the whole field lies somewhat apart from that of the New Thought, the mental-healing movement has profited by it. Spiritualism is a protest against the materialism of the nineteenth century. It is one of the signs of the times. We have been gradually coming to know what spirit-return means, what a genuine message from the other life would be. What we want is a better philosophy than that which psychical experiences ordi-narily seem to imply.

Psychology in the sense in which we now employ the term did not exist when the New Thought move-ment began. We are now so accustomed to the psychological point of view of every subject of public interest that we forget how recent it is. Modern science in general had to come first, then the theory of evolution, with the attempt to explain mental life on a biological basis, and the gradual transfer of inter-est to the inner life. The terms "suggestion," "subconscious," and the other words which we employ so freely are very new indeed. The old intellectualism in psychology prevailed for the most part throughout the nineteenth century. When a psychological laboratory was established at last it was in behalf of a physiological point of view, and like many other theories imported from Germany we have still to esti-mate the physiological theory in its true estate. In the end it may seem as far from the truth as the ideal-ism and criticism which we are in process of examining anew. If psychology is a sign of the times we may well remind ourselves that the end is not yet. For there are many rivals in the field. The implied psychology of the New Thought is essentially practical and decidedly unlike that mental science which holds that the inner life is wholly determined by the brain. For the devotee of mental healing the mind is what actual success seems to prove it to be in the endeavor of the soul to conquer circumstance. It is well to study the history of mental healing without regard to the psychology of the laboratories.

The new age began in part as a reaction against authority in favor of individualism and the right to test belief by personal experience. By acquiring the right to think for himself in religious matters, man also gained freedom to live according to his convictions. Inner experience came into its own as the means of testing even the most exclusive teachings of the Church. The seat of authority was found by some in human reason, by others in what the Quakers call the inward light. Thus inward guidance led the way to another and more spiritual phase of liberalism. The Emersonian idea of self-reliance is an expression of this faith in the light which shines for the individual within the sanctuary of the soul. After the mental-healing movement had been in process for half a century its devotees saw in Emerson a prophet of the ideas for which they had been laboring in their own way, each within the sphere of his experience. This emphasis on inner experience is a sign of our age, but it took us a long while to read the signs.

Now that we have passed into the social period we are able to appreciate the individualism of the nine-teenth century. It was of course necessary for man to win the right to think for himself, to test matters for himself, and to become aware of his subjective life in contrast with the objective. Man had to plead for salvation as the individual's privilege. He was eager to prove that the individual survived death, that a spirit could return and establish its identity. He also had to contend for the freedom of the individual in contrast with the tendency of evolutionism to regard man as a product of heredity and environment. Our whole modern view of success has grown up around a new conception of the individual. We have pleaded for man the individual in manifold ways since modern science made us acquainted with the the-ory of physical force, its laws, processes, and conditions. But in the twentieth century we have taken a long step beyond the individualism with which the modern liberal movement began.

The present is the dawning age of brotherhood. It marks an advance not only beyond the theoretical ide-alism which emphasized Thought as the only reality but beyond all types of theory in which stress is placed upon the subjective. We have come out into the open again after the age-long endeavor to ac-quaint man with the inner life. We penetrated the inner world to gain new insights, to acquire the psy-chological point of view, to discover the psychical, to learn about suggestion and the subconscious. We had to learn that all real development is from within outward according to law
Today we are engaged in applying our new discoveries. The history of the New Thought is for the most part the record of one of several contemporaneous movements in favor of the inner life and the individ-ual. We can understand it now because our age has given us the contrast. To follow that history intelli-gently is to see in it an effort for knowledge and power which we now take as matter of course. Each of us has in a measure come to hold the present social point of view because those who went before earned for us the right to individual salvation, gave us the inner point of view.

It was the war more than any other event of our century which gave us the contrast through which we now understand the subjectivism of the nineteenth century. The war made us aware that we had traveled very far. It showed us the widespread social tendency of our age. It was the greatest objective social struggle the world has witnessed; for never was the autocrat. the mere individual so effectively organ-ized as in this "last war of the kings." Yet never was there such a social protest against every right which the mere individual takes unto himself in his effort to impose his ideas on the world.

As a result we now see plainly that all true peace is social. Our nation was brought out of its isolation into prominence as a world-power to secure this larger, lasting peace. As a result we realize that justice is social. We are all pondering over the nature of social justice. We are aware that this is the great issue, now that we have turned from the war as an external enterprise to interpret the warfare of the classes. We are pleading for moral and spiritual considerations as eagerly as before. But we see that, strictly speaking, the moral and spiritual are neither subjective nor objective: they are social. Hence we look for every clue that points toward cooperation and brotherhood. We are passing beyond the old competitive spirit. The nations have been brought close by working for a common end. Never before has the world witnessed such a spirit of service.

This growing awareness of the intimacy of relationship of the individual with society has increased with us in line with the newer thought of God as immanent in the world, as the resident cause of all evolution. Our thought of God has become practical, concrete. This newer conception of God also belongs with the desire of the modern man to test everything for himself, to feel in his own life whatever man claims to have felt in the past that exalted him. Thus the practice of the presence of God follows as a natural con-sequence of the newer idea of man. The liberalism which set man free from the old theology left him free where he could turn to all the first-hand sources of religion for himself.

In a practical sense of the word we may say that the new age is witnessing a return to the original Chris-tianity of the Gospels. The great work of religious liberalism in the nineteenth century consisted in free-ing the world of theologies which we need never have believed. The war has brought us to the point where we can begin to appreciate what kind of social reform Christianity would have ushered in if it had been tried. The original teaching was social in the larger, truer sense. It called for brotherhood. It came to establish peace. It came that all men might have life and have it more abundantly. The spirit of the new age counsels us to return to the Bible as the Book of Life. It assures us anew that that which is spiri-tual must be spiritually discerned. It puts the emphasis on conduct, on the life. It came to minister to the whole individual. Only through social salvation can we begin to attain its fulness.

Granted the clues which our century affords us, we see clearly that the founders of Christian theology made a serious mistake when they divided the individual, assigning the problems of sin and salvation to the priest and neglecting the individual in the larger sense in which Jesus Christ ministered to him. Our age is giving the whole individual back to us. It is like a new discovery, this modern view of man as in-teriorly abounding in resources and outwardly social, a brother to all mankind. The last century wit-nessed the rediscovery of the inner life. The present is witnessing the rediscovery of man the social be-ing. We are prepared at last to consider the question of health as at once individual and social. We had to understand man the social being before we could begin rightly to minister.

The original Christianity was a gospel of healing in which the problems of sin and disease, of the indi-vidual in his relation to society, were not separated. The values of this gospel as a religion of healing were lost to view for ages. Our age has disclosed them anew. The mental-healing movement came into being to make these values clear. Its pioneers had to contend for recognition amidst universal unfriendli-ness. They had to begin their work several generations ago that we might enjoy its benefits today. Some of the devotees had to stand for very radical views in order to attract attention. Thus Christian Science so-called had an office to perform in contrast with the materialism of the age. Extremes beget extremes. Our part is to discern the neglected truths, as old as the hills, but covered over with doctrines and dog-mas.

As a reaction against the materialism of the nineteenth century in favor of the original gospel of healing, we can hardly follow the history of the New Thought without reminding ourselves of the age as a whole against which it was a protest. But it would be easy to overestimate the influence of the environment in which the mental-healing movement appeared. A practical protest headed by people who work in a quiet way to relieve human ills is very different from an intellectual protest such as religious liberalism. A practical protest cannot be explained by reference to ideas alone. It is a protest in behalf of life. It is an appeal to conduct. It becomes known by its fruits long before it has a theory to give to the world. Its leaders educate themselves, not by going through the schools and assimilating the prevalent teachings, but by turning away to experiment for themselves.

When the new theories have at last been promulgated, we can look back and trace resemblances in his-tory as a hole. But the new theories when propounded were probably far more out of accord with the generation in which they appeared than in harmony with it. The new views were for our own age, and that age had not come. We cannot in reality explain these views either by heredity or by reference to en-vironment. The true explanation calls for a return to the idea that there is a purpose in creation. The new development began early enough so that it would be ready when needed.

In so far as the mental-healing movement began as a protest this protest or reaction was made in a par-ticular way, very different from that of the reaction which gave us modern liberalism. Medical science was so far inferior to its present estate that it is difficult for us to put ourselves in sympathetic imagina-tion back in Mr. Quimby's time, in 1840, to see why he spoke of physicians as "blind guides leading the blind," as "slave-drivers'' compelling the sick to enter a bondage worse than that of slavery in the South. We need to divest the mind of very nearly every explanatory idea we now employ in order to account for the vigor of that reaction. The spirit of the new age was there potentially, but it was merely potential. Mr. Quimby was far from being aware of it. He was simply a pioneer investigator. Matters which we now understand by reference to psychology were still in such a crude state that people believed in a mysterious magnetic fluid by which a mesmeriser could put a subject into a curious state called "sleep." Nothing that a mental healer would call promising had yet appeared. Disease was apparently an "entity" that attacked man from without. Whatever man may once have known about the influence of mind upon the body had been forgotten. Never had a pioneer so few paths to follow.

In retrospect, knowing the new age as we now do, we know of course that there were clues which might have been followed. There were books which Mr. Quimby could have read in which he might have learned the laws of the intimate relationships of mind and body. It seems natural for us to protest against medical materialism. We take it for granted that any one who is in search of health will try to find help in any direction that is promising. The gospel of healing in the original Christianity is so plain to some of us that we wonder how anyone could have missed it. But Mr. Quimby knew nothing about it. He had no psychological knowledge. The only defensible view concerning his relation to the new age which we can maintain is that the new light was shining in the inner world and anyone who was sufficiently free from his age to turn to it might be enlightened, even though he were uneducated as education is com-monly understood in the world.

What we shall understand the new age to mean in this the spiritual sense of the word is this shining of a new light which cannot be accounted for by reference to anything external. To try to explain it by study-ing the tendencies of the age as matters of material or intellectual history would be to try to explain the higher by the lower. All real causes are spiritual. New leaders appear when they are needed. A new work begins in the fitness of time according to the divine providence. To understand the causes we need a measure of the same enlightenment. The true verifications are those of experience. Unless you are will-ing to seek light and test the principles in question for yourself you may not expect to understand. The new age bids us go to the sources for ourselves. Those sources are discoverable through the inward light, by the aid of intuition, through appreciation of the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures. The life comes before the doctrine. It is the fruits which indicate the value. Hence Mr. Quimby said that the sick were his friends. Those who had been restored to health by spiritual means were convinced that there was a great truth in the new method of healing. All the early healers, writers and teachers were healed in the new way, and the ideas were put forth on the basis of experience.

In following the history of the New Thought we are therefore concerned with practical life. The intellec-tual movements of the new age do not explain its practical tendencies. We cannot account for the New Thought unless we learn the sources of the gospel of healing, without which the New Thought in its pre-sent forms would not have come into being.

Chapter 2 - QUIMBY THE PIONEER

PHINEAS PARKHURST QUIMBY was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. He did not carry on his investigations in the mental world as the representative of any sect or school. He was not aware that treasures lay before him in the promised land which he was about to enter. Few men have owed so little to the age in which they lived. His ancestors were not in any way remarkable. His early life gave no in-dication of the public work to which his productive years were to be devoted. He is not to be accounted for by reference to his education in the schools or by reference to the books which he read. Conse-quently, there is no reason for inquiring into his life, ancestry, and environment, as we ordinarily study the life of a man who has been of service to the world. At the outset he was simply an explorer in a little known region, that is, a region little known in his day. He was like the hardy pioneer who makes his way through a primitive forest unaware of his destination, unacquainted with the difficulties along the way, and not burdened by the opinions of predecessors whose advice might have been misleading. When new lines of inquiry are to be developed for the good of mankind, God usually summons a man from the common walks of life, one who Is sufficiently open and responsive to follow where the wisdom within him leads.

There is a great advantage in leadership of this sort. For the pioneer becomes acquainted with all the ob-stacles and grows strong by overcoming them. Face to face with difficult situations, he must find a way to meet them. He is led to the first-hand sources of reality. He proves the principle which becomes to him a great truth because of his own immediate needs, and so he is able to appeal to tangible results by way of verification of his teachings. But those who merely follow, and that means the majority of man-kind in every land and in all time, believe on authority and gradually lose touch with reality. Thus new pioneers, sages, or prophets are needed every now and then through the ages, to lead the way back to the original sources of life and truth. The moral would be, if we could read it, that we should all adopt the pioneer's spirit and explore for ourselves, learning the great lesson taught by those who made their own way in new fields.

The spiritual pioneer in whose career we are at present interested lived a very simple early life. Born in a small New England town, he spent his entire life in New England, and his work was little known outside of Maine until after his death. He was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire, February 16, 1802. From there the family moved to Belfast, Maine, when he was about two years old. His death occurred in the latter place. January I6, 1866, at the close of twenty-five years in the practice of spiritual healing.

His father was a blacksmith, and his life and education were such as one might enjoy in the humblest of homes in a country town in New England. Mr. Quimby attended school as a boy for a brief period only, and he acquired knowledge of the elementary branches with such training as the district schools of the day afforded. The meagerness of his education is accounted for by the fact that there were few re-sources at hand, and his father was financially unable to give him other opportunities. If we conclude that he was in any degree an educated man, it will be because we deem education in the school of ex-perience or in the inner life superior to that of the schools.

Mr. Quimby had an inquiring, inventive type of mind, and during his middle life he produced several inventions on which he obtained letters patent. He took great interest in scientific subjects but not in a way that led him to become a reader of scientific works. Nor was he ever a reader of books in general. His manuscripts contain remarkably few quotations or references, except that in his later years he fre-quently introduced passages from the New Testament in order to put his own interpretation upon them. He refers to but one philosopher by name, and he appears never to have heard of the names of the ideal-ists, such as Berkeley and Emerson, whose philosophy might have aided him had he been acquainted with their works.

He felt no antagonism to the Church in his early years, but the churches seem to have had no direct in-fluence upon him, and he did not take up the study of the New Testament until his investigations led him to a point where he believed he had a clue to its inner meaning. Although the title "doctor" has been ap-plied to him, he was without medical or other therapeutic trainIng. In fact, he stood in avowed antago-nism to the "old school" in the medical world. He was not a spiritist, despite the fact that the rise of spir-itism in the United States was contemporaneous with his work, and despite the resemblance between some of his views and the teachings of spiritualists.

The reason for his lack of interest in books is found in the fact that he regarded most books as full of un-proved assertions, whereas he was interested to test all matters for himself. He was fond of referring to most statements passing current in the world as knowledge in a somewhat skeptical way, since this boasted knowledge seemed to him mere "opinion," in contrast with truth that could be established on a basis of verifiable evidence and sound reasoning. He did not raise objections as did people trained in the schools, through mere love of argument, but because by implication he already possessed intuitively those principles which were to guide him in his investigations. His awakening came, not through intel-lectual development in the usual sense of the word, but through the demands of practical experience.

At the time Mr. Quimby began his investigations in the mental world he was described by a newspaper writer as "in size rather smaller than the medium of man, with a well-proportioned and well-balanced head, and with the power of concentration surpassing anything we have ever witnessed. His eyes are black and very piercing, with rather a pleasant expression; and he possesses the power of looking at one object, without even winking, for a great length of time." His son, George A. Quimby, in the New Eng-land Magazine, March, 1988, adds to this description the fact that Mr. Quimby weighed about one hun-dred and twenty-five pounds; that he was quick-motioned and nervous, with a high, broad forehead, a rather prominent nose, and mouth indicating strength and firmness of will, "persistent in what he under-took, and not easily discouraged."

Speaking of Quimby's discoveries, Mr. Julius A. Dresser says, "If you think this seems to show that Quimby was a remarkable man, let me tell you that he was one of the most unassuming of men that ever lived; for no one could well be more so, or make less account of his achievements. Humility was a marked feature of his character (I knew him intimately). To this was united a benevolent and an unsel-fish nature, and a love of truth, with a remarkably keen perception. But the distinguishing feature of his mind was that he could not entertain an opinion, because it was not knowledge. His faculties were so practical and perceptive that the wisdom of mankind, which is largely made up of opinions, was of little value to him. Hence the charge that he was not an educated man is literally true. True knowledge to him was positive proof, as in a problem in mathematics. Therefore, he discarded books and sought phenom-ena, where his perceptive faculties made him master of the situation.*

*The True History of Mental Science.

Another writer, speaking of the impression produced upon Mr. Quimby's patients, says, "He seemed to know at once the attitude of mind of those who applied to him for help, and adapted himself to them ac-cordingly. His years of study of the human mind, of sickness in all its forms, and of the prevailing reli-gious beliefs, gave him the ability to see through the opinions, doubts, and fears of those who sought his aid, and put him in instant sympathy with their mental attitude. He seemed to know that I had come to him feeling that he was a last resort, and with but little faith in him or his mode of treatment. But, in-stead of telling me that I was not sick, he sat beside me, and explained to me what my sickness was, how I got into the condition, and the way I could be taken out of it through the right understanding. He seemed to see through the situation from the beginning, and explained the cause and effect so clearly that I could see a little of what he meant. . . .

"The most vivid remembrance I have . . . is his appearance as he came out of his private office ready for the next patient. That indescribable sense of conviction, of clear-sightedness, of energetic action---that something that made one feel that it would be useless to attempt to cover up or hide anything from him---made an impression never to be forgotten. Even now in recalling it . . . I can feel the thrill of new life which came with his presence and his look. There was something about him that gave one a sense of perfect confidence and ease in his presence---a feeling that immediately banished all doubts and preju-dices, and put one in sympathy with that quiet strength or power by which he wrought his cures." *

*A. G. Dresser, The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, p. 45.

The attitude of mind which Mr. Quimby was in when he began to investigate is clearly indicated by the following from an article written in 1863 in which he describes what he calls his "conversion from dis-ease to health, and the subsequent changes from belief in the medical faculty to entire disbelief in it," and to the knowledge of the truth on which he based his theory of spiritual healing.

"Can a theory be found," Mr. Quimby asks, "can a theory be found, capable of practice, which can sepa-rate truth from error? I undertake to say there is a method of reasoning which, being understood, can separate one from the other. Men never dispute about a fact that can be demonstrated by scientific rea-soning. Controversies arise from some idea that has been turned into a false direction, leading to a false position. The basis of my reasoning is this point: that whatever is true to a person, if he cannot prove it, is not necessarily true to another. Therefore, because a person says a thing is no reason that he says true. The greatest evil that follows taking an opinion for a truth is disease. Let medical and religious opinions, which produce so vast an amount of misery, be tested by the rule I have laid down, and it will be seen how much they are founded in truth. For twenty years I have been investigating them, and I have failed to find one single principle of truth in either. This is not from any prejudice against the medical faculty; for, when I began to investigate the mind, I was entirely on that side. I was prejudiced in favor of the medical faculty; for I never employed any one outside of the regular faculty, nor took the least particle of quack medicine.

"Some thirty years ago I was very sick, and was considered fast wasting away with consumption. At that time I became so low that it was with difficulty I could walk about. I was all the while under the allo-pathic practice, and I had taken so much calomel that my system was said to be poisoned with it; and I had lost many of my teeth from the effect. My symptoms were those of any consumptive; and I had been told that my liver was affected and my kidneys diseased, and that my lungs were nearly consumed. I be-lieved all this, from the fact that I had all the symptoms, and could not resist the opinions of the physi-cian while having the [supposed] proof with me. In this state I was compelled to abandon my business; and, losing all hope, I gave up to die---not that I thought the medical faculty had no wisdom, but that my case was one that could not be cured.

"Having an acquaintance who cured himself by riding horseback, I thought I would try riding in a car-riage, as I was too weak to ride horse-back. My horse was contrary; and, once, when about two miles from home, he stopped at the foot of a long hill, and would not start except as I went by his side. So I was obliged to run nearly the whole distance. Having reached the top of the hill I got into the carriage; and, as I was very much exhausted, I concluded to sit there the balance of the day, if the horse did not start. Like all sickly and nervous people, I could not remain easy in that place; and seeing a man plow-ing, I waited till he had plowed around a three acre lot, and got within sound of my voice, when I asked him to start my horse. He did so, and at the time I was so weak I could scarcely lift my whip. But ex-citement took possession of my senses, and I drove the horse, as fast as he could go, up hill and down, till I reached home; and, when I got into the stable, I felt as strong as ever I did."

This experience was of course only the beginning. It led Mr. Quimby to doubt the diagnosis in his case. It showed him what could be accomplished through a vigorous arousing out of a state of bondage and mere acceptance. He was not cured, but precisely what his malady was and how it would be overcome he did not know. It was his investigation of the phenomena of hypnotism, then called mesmerism, which gave him the direct clue.

The subject of mesmerism was introduced into the United States in 1836 by Charles Poyen, a French-man, and was taken up in New England by a Dr. Collyer, who gave a lecture with demonstrations in Belfast, Maine, in 1838. Mr. Quimby regarded the mesmeric sleep, or hypnosis as it would now be called, as an interesting phenomenon worthy of investigation, and without knowing what his interest would lead to he began to experiment, and in 1840 gave his first public demonstrations. Whenever op-portunity offered, he had tried to put people into the mesmeric sleep. Sometimes he failed, but again he found a person whom he could influence.

"In the course of his trials with subjects," says Mr. George A. Quimby in the account quoted from above, Mr. Quimby "met with a young man named Lucius Burkmar over whom he had the most won-derful influence; and it is not stating it too strongly to assert that with him he made some of the most as-tonishing exhibitions of mesmerism and clairvoyance that have been given in modern times.

"Mr. Quimby's manner of operating with his subject was to sit opposite to him, holding both his hands in his, and looking him intently in the eye for a short time, when the subject would go into that state known as the mesmeric sleep which was more properly a peculiar condition of mind and body, in which the natural senses would or would not operate at the will of Mr. Quimby. When conducting his experiments, all communications on the part of Mr. Quimby with Lucius were mentally given, the subject replying as if spoken to aloud. . . .

"As the subject gained more prominence, thoughtful men began to investigate the matter; and Mr. Quimby was often called upon to have his subject examine the sick. We would put Lucius into the mes-meric state, who would then examine the patient, describe his disease, and prescribe remedies for its cure.

"After a time Mr. Quimby became convinced that, whenever the subject examined a patient, his diagno-sis of the case would be identical with what either the patient or someone else present believed, instead of Lucius really looking into the patient and giving the true condition of the organs; in fact, that he was reading the opinion in the mind of someone rather than stating a truth acquired by himself.

"Becoming firmly satisfied that this was the case, and having seen how one mind could influence an-other, and how much there was that had always been considered as true, but was merely someone's opin-ion, Mr. Quimby gave up his subject, Lucius, and began the developing of what is now known as mental healing, or curing disease through the mind."

That this discovery concerning the influence of medical opinion and the influence of one mind on an-other was worth pursuing to the end is clear from Mr. Quimby's account of the way he overcame his own illness. He was still in quest of health while experimenting with Lucius. His investigations showed him that there was a great discrepancy between the ordinary diagnosis and the actual state of a person suffering from disease, and it occurred to him that light could be thrown on his own malady. In fact, he had been led to believe by the astonishing results produced in cases where Lucius made an intuitive di-agnosis that disease itself was, as he tells us, "a deranged state of mind," the cause of which is to be found in someone's unfortunate belief. "Disease," he assures us, and its power over life, its curability, "are all embraced in our belief. Some believe in various remedies, and others believe that the spirits of the dead prescribe. I have no confidence in the virtue of either. I know that cures have been made in these ways. I do not deny them. But the principle on which they are done is the question to solve; for the disease can be cured, with or without medicine, on but one principle."

When he had discovered what that principle was and how it could be employed, namely, by producing changes in the mind of the patient holding the belief in question and subject to medical opinion, with all that this dependence implies, he saw that it was no longer necessary to make use of his mesmeric sub-ject, but that he could apply the principle directly himself. First, however, he had to prove the principle by recovering his own health.

"Now for my particular experience," writes Mr. Quimby in the article quoted in The True History of Mental Science. "I had pains in the back, which, they said, were caused by my kidneys, which were partly consumed. I was also told that I had ulcers on my lungs. Under this belief, I was miserable enough to be of no account in the world. This was the state I was in when I commenced to mesmerize. 0n one occasion, when I had my subject asleep, he described the pains I felt in my back (I had never dared to ask him to examine me, for I felt sure that my kidneys were nearly gone), and he placed his hand on the spot where I felt the pain. He then told me that my kidneys were in a very bad state,-- that one was half consumed, and a piece three inches long had separated from it, and was only connected by a slender thread. This was what I believed to be true, for it agreed with what the doctors had told me, and with what I had suffered; for I had not been free from pain for years. My common sense told me that no medicine would ever cure this trouble, and therefore I must suffer till death relieved me. But I asked him if there was any remedy. He replied, 'Yes, I can put the piece on so it will grow, and you will get well.' At this I was completely astonished, and knew not what to think. He immediately placed his hands upon me, and said he united the pieces so they would grow. The next day he said they had grown together, and from that day I never have experienced the least pain from them.

"Now what was the secret of the cure? I had not the least doubt but that I was as he described; and, if he had said, as I expected he would, that nothing could be done, I should have died in a year or so. But, when he said he could cure me in the way he proposed, I began to think; and I discovered that I had been deceived into a belief that made me sick. The absurdity of his remedies made me doubt the fact that my kidneys were diseased, for he said in two days that they were as well as ever. If he saw the first condi-tion, he also saw the last; for in both cases he said he could see. I concluded in the first instance that he read my thoughts and when he said he could cure me he drew on his own mind; and his ideas were so absurd that the disease vanished by the absurdity of the cure. This was the first stumbling-block I found in the medical science. I soon ventured to let him examine me further, and in every case he could de-scribe my feelings, but would vary about the amount of disease; and his explanation and remedies al-ways convinced me that I had no such disease, and that my troubles were of my own make.

"At this time I frequently visited the sick with Lucius, by invitation of the attending physician; and the boy examined the patient, and told facts that would astonish everybody, and yet every one of them was believed. For instance, he told of a person affected as I had been only worse, that his lungs looked like a honey comb, and his liver was covered with ulcers. He then prescribed some simple herb tea, and the patient recovered; and the doctor believed the medicine cured him. But I believed the doctor made the disease; and his faith in the boy made a change in the mind, and the cure followed. Instead of gaining confidence in the doctors, I was forced to the conclusion that their science is false.

"Man is made up of truth and belief; and, if he is deceived into a belief that he has, or is liable to have a disease, the belief is catching, and the effect follows it. I have given the experience of my emancipation from this belief and from my confidence in the doctors, so that it may open the eyes of those who stand where I was. I have risen from this belief; and I return to warn my brethren, lest, when they are dis-turbed, they shall get into this place of torment prepared by the medical faculty. Having suffered myself, I cannot take advantage of my fellowmen by introducing a new mode of curing disease by prescribing medicine. My theory exposes the hypocrisy of those who undertake to cure in that way. They make ten diseases to one cure, thus bringing a surplus of misery into the world, and shutting out a healthy state of society. . . . When I cure, there is one disease the less. . . . My theory teaches man to manufacture health; and, when people go into this occupation, disease will diminish, and those who furnish disease and death will be few and scarce."

Had Mr. Quimby been willing to take advantage of people, he might have continued to employ his sub-ject in the diagnosing of disease, for it was evident that no one else understood the significance of his discovery that with a change of mind a cure would follow. If he had been content with his own restora-tion to health, he might have used his subject instead of exerting himself to develop his own mental powers. But, naturally honest and determined to get at the truth, Quimby dropped mesmerism once for all. And well he might, for his experiments had made him acquainted with himself. He saw that the hu-man spirit possesses other powers than those of the senses, and can influence another mind directly, that is, without the aid of spoken language. He realized that he too possessed clairvoyant or intuitive powers, and that it was not necessary for the mind to be put into the mesmeric sleep in order to exercise these powers. His subject, Lucius, had done little more than to read the mind of a patient, discover what the person in question thought was his disease, and then prescribe some simple remedy in which the patient was led to believe. This was merely to make use of suggestion, as we now call it, and Quimby's discov-ery had disclosed the mind's suggestibility. Mr. Quimby wanted to go further. He was eager to know the full truth concerning disease and its cure by the one fundamental principle implied in all cases, whatever the appearances in favor of medicine. To have remained where his experiments with mesmerism brought him would have been to practice mental healing simply. Mr. Quimby's impetus was spiritual, and he did not rest until he had acquired spiritual insight into the whole field of the inner life. His experiments with Lucius were merely introductory to his life work.

It is interesting to read what Mr. George Quimby says of his father's discovery, for he was his father's secretary for years and had opportunity to follow Quimby's work with the sick in all its details, although he was not himself a healer.

Mr. Quimby informs us that his father spent years developing the method and theory of spiritual healing, fighting the battle alone, and laboring with great energy and steadiness of purpose. "To reduce his dis-covery to a science which could be taught for the benefit of suffering humanity was the all-absorbing idea of his life. To develop his 'theory,' or 'the Truth,' as he always termed it, so that others than himself could understand and practice it, was what he labored for. Had he been of a sordid and grasping nature, he might have acquired unlimited wealth; but for that he seemed to have no desire. . . .

"Each step was in opposition to all the established ideas of the day, and was ridiculed and combated by the whole medical faculty and the great mass of the people. In the sick and suffering he always found staunch friends, who loved him and believed in him, and stood by him; but they were but a handful compared with those on the other side.

"While engaged in his mesmeric experiments, Mr. Quimby became more and more convinced that dis-ease was an error of the mind, and not a real thing; and in this he was misunderstood by others, and ac-cused of attributing the sickness of the patient to the imagination, which was the reverse of the fact. 'If a man feels a pain, he knows he feels it, and there is no imagination about it,' he used to say. But the fact that the pain might be a state of the mind, while apparent in the body, he did believe. As one can suffer in a dream all that it is possible in a waking state, so Mr. Quimby averred that the same condition of mind might operate on the body in the form of disease, and still be no more of a reality than was the dream."

In view of the fact that some one has tried to belittle Mr. Quimby as an "ignorant mesmerist" who never advanced beyond this crude mode of influencing people, it is significant to read this authoritative state-ment in his son's account:

"As the truths of his discovery began to develop and grow in him, just in the same proportion did he be-gin to lose faith in the efficacy of mesmerism as a remedial agent in the cure of the sick; and after a few years he discarded it all together.

"Instead of putting the patient into a mesmeric sleep, Mr. Quimby would sit by him; and, after giving a detailed account of what his troubles were, he would simply converse with him, and explain the causes of his troubles, and thus change the mind of the patient, and disabuse it of its error and establish the truth in its place, which, if done, was the cure. . . .

"Mr. Quimby always denied emphatically that he used any mesmeric or mediumistic power. He was al-ways in his normal condition when engaged with his patient. He never went into any trance, and was a strong disbeliever in spiritualism, as understood by that name. He claimed, and firmly held, that his only power consisted in his wisdom, and in his understanding the patient's case and being able to explain away the error and establish the truth, or health, in its place. . . .

"In the year 1859 Mr. Quimby went to Portland, where he remained till the summer of 1865, treating the sick by his peculiar method. It was his custom to converse at length with many of his patients who be-came interested in his method of treatment, and try to unfold to them his ideas.

"Among his earlier patients in Portland were the Misses Ware, daughters of the late Judge Ashur Ware, of the United States Court; and they became much interested in 'the Truth,' as he called it.* But the ideas were so new, and his reasoning was so divergent from the popular conceptions that they found it diffi-cult to follow him or remember all he said; and they suggested to him the propriety of putting into writ-ing the body of his thoughts.

*See: The Spirit of the New Thought, "Can Disease be entirely Destroyed?" by Emma G. Ware, p.67

"From that time he began to write out his ideas, which practice he continued until his death, the articles now being in the possession of the writer of this sketch. The original copy he would give to the Misses Ware; and it would be read to him by them, and, if he suggested any alteration, it would be made, after which it would be copied either by the Misses Ware or the writer of this, and then reread to him, that he might see that all was just as he intended it. Not even the most trivial word or the construction of a sen-tence would be changed without consulting him. He was given to repetition; and it was with difficulty that he could be induced to have a repeated sentence or phrase stricken out, as he would say, 'If that idea is a good one, and true, it will do no harm to have it in two or three times.' "

It was during the period of his more important practice in Portland that those patients visited him who were later to spread his ideas in the world. The first of these was Mr. Julius A. Dresser, who went to him as a patient when near the point of death in June, 1860, and who became so deeply interested in Mr. Quimby's teachings that after regaining his health he devoted the larger part of his time to explaining the new ideas and methods of Mr. Quimby to patients. Among these patients was Miss Annetta G. Seabury, afterwards Mrs. Julius A. Dresser; and Mrs. Mary Baker Patterson, later Mrs. Eddy, author of Science and Health. In 1863, Rev. W. F. Evans visited Mr. Quimby as a patient and became at once so ardent a follower that he devoted the remainder of his life to promulgating the spiritual philosophy implied in the method and ideas which he gained from Quimby.

It was Mr. Quimby's intention to retire from his practice with the sick and write a book setting forth his teachings in permanent form. Had he done so, there would have been no controversy over the origin of mental healing in our day, and the later writers would not have acquired the habit of setting forth his views as if they had been original enough to acquire them out of the air by "revelation." But Mr. Dresser always maintained that there was a wisdom in the delay, since the public was then unprepared for them. Mr. Evans, who became the first author to develop these ideas, was perhaps better fitted for his work than was Mr. Quimby, since he was well read and able to put forth those ideas which were best calcu-lated to win the public at the time he wrote. Meanwhile, the manuscript books into which Mr. Quimby's articles were copied have been preserved and some of us have had access to them in connection with our work of giving the new ideas to the world.

Mr. George Quimby concludes the account of his father's life with a brief reference to Mr. Quimby's view of life as a whole: "Mr. Quimby, although not belonging to any church or sect, had a deeply reli-gious nature, holding firmly to God as the first cause, and fully believing in immortality and progression after death, though entertaining entirely original conceptions of what death is. He believed that Jesus's mission was to the sick, and that he performed his cures in a scientific manner, and perfectly understood how he did them. Mr. Quimby was a great reader of the Bible, but put a construction upon it thoroughly in harmony with his train of thought.

"Mr. Quimby's idea of happiness was to benefit mankind, especially the sick and suffering; and to that end he labored and gave his life and strength. His patients not only found in him a doctor, but a sympa-thizing friend; and he took the same interest in treating a charity patient that he did a wealthy one. Until the writer went with him as secretary, he kept no accounts and made no charges. He left the keeping of books entirely with his patients; and, although he pretended to have a regular price for visits and atten-dance, he took as settlement whatever the patient chose to pay him. . . .

"An hour before he breathed his last he said to the writer: 'I am more than ever convinced of the truth of my theory. I am perfectly willing for the change myself, but I know you will all feel badly; but I know that I shall be right here with you, just the same as I have always been. I do not dread the change any more than if I were going on a trip to Philadelphia.' His death occurred January 18, 1866, at his resi-dence in Belfast, at the age of sixty-four years. . . ."

Chapter 3 - QUIMBY'S METHOD OF HEALING

IT was a long step from dependence on the medical practice of the day to Mr. Quimby's experiments with his subject, Lucius. It was a much longer step, involving a more courageous departure from ac-cepted beliefs, when he gave up his subject and developed a mode of treatment not at that time practiced anywhere else in the world. The first change was from one theory of mental life to another, and the change did not necessarily imply a different view of the natural world. But the second was radical. It implied a spiritual philosophy of life as a whole. The emphasis was shifted from human beliefs in rela-tion to bodily processes to divine causality and its meaning in the progress of the human soul. Mr. Quimby's discovery concerning the influence of belief in the cause and cure of disease was incidental to his profounder discovery that man is a spiritual being, living an essentially spiritual life in the higher world above the flesh, the eternal spiritual world of our relationship with God.

The progress which Mr. Quimby thus made was natural and logical. His experiments first made him ac-quainted with the clairvoyant or intuitive powers of his subject, Lucius, then showed him that he too possessed such powers and so need not depend on Lucius. His reasoning was that these higher powers in the human spirit imply the existence of a guiding principle or wisdom common to us all, that this princi-ple is God in us; hence that the soul is in immediate relation with the divine mind. Furthermore, he had concluded that, whatever the explanation offered, all healing takes place according to one principle, and this too he attributed to the divine in man. His experiments had taught him that one mind can influence another directly, the one being receptive, the other affirmative. It was but one step more to adopt the principle that as thought may influence another's mind directly spiritual power is capable of such influ-ence too. Hence Mr. Quimby advanced from the discovery that thoughts and mental atmospheres affect another's mind according to the belief or expectation to the conclusion that one spirit may operate di-rectly on another spirit, and that the basis of this spiritual activity is the divine in us. Although naturally active, affirmative in type, with exceptional powers of concentration, Mr. Quimby was as we have seen above also humble, not inclined to take credit to himself. It was natural, therefore, that he should reach the highest conclusion of all, namely, that the efficiency was divine, that it was through the divine wis-dom that he achieved his cures.

The acceptance of these principles and conclusions implied a different philosophy of life because, in the first place, it became clear that all reality fundamentally speaking is spiritual. Mr. Quimby did not un-dertake to develop his theory into a philosophy of the universe as a whole. That was not his province. Nor did he have the training or the acquaintance with idealism. The references to the outer world which he makes in his manuscripts were purely practical in nature, to the effect that life for each of us is essen-tially what we make it by our belief, our attitude or way of taking it. This attitude was, for most people, so he saw clearly, largely the effect of opinions taken for truth. But he also saw that there was a way of taking life which implied the supremacy of the spiritual over the material. For him all causes were in reality spiritual. The world springs from spiritual sources. Experience is for the benefit of spiritual be-ings. We might then acquire a complete spiritual view. This would disclose the truth in contrast with mere opinion, the truth which is the same for all. It would imply a spiritual science. And this science was involved in the method by which Mr. Quimby wrought his cures.

The instructive consideration for those of us who are concerned to follow the development of this phi-losophy and test its principles for ourselves lies in the fact that Mr. Quimby found the guiding principle in his own inner experience, and proved it through the recovery of his health and the healing of others before he found any evidences that what he called "the truth" or "theory" had ever been held before. For-tunately, his mind was not encumbered by doctrines which had first to be outgrown, save that he had shared the conventional beliefs of his day in medical practice and was at least a believer in a general way in the Bible. His real study of the Bible began with the conclusion that the way which life had led him was the way described in the New Testament, hence that he had rediscovered the method of healing by which Jesus wrought, not his "miracles," but his highly intelligible works of healing. His work with the sick seemed to him to imply a spiritual science, a "science of life and happiness," as he called it. This science he found implicit in the teachings of Christ. The Bible thus became doubly true for him, because of his former belief in God, now transfigured in the light of his discoveries; and because his insight into the nature and meaning of life had made plain the way to the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures. His manuscripts are for the most part devoted to a study of his experiences with the sick in such a way as to show that the truths they implied were the truths which Jesus came to reveal.

Just as his guidance had led him to attribute his cures, which were indeed remarkable, to the divine effi-ciency, not to any power which he, the man Quimby, possessed; so now he looked to the Bible as con-taining a higher than human wisdom, a wisdom which he called "the Christ" in contrast with the man Jesus who came to teach this science of the Christ. Had Mr. Quimby been understood by the writer who later did more than anyone to popularize the less profound principles for which he stood, the history of the mental-healing movement might have been very different. For what Mr. Quimby intended was that all should come to recognize the divine wisdom in themselves, that they should take no credit to them-selves, should not exalt the finite self; but should acquire and teach the spiritual principles which Jesus gave to the world as a science, calling attention to that science, not to themselves.

According to Mr. Quimby's version of this Christian science, as he calls it in two of his articles, although his usual term is "the science of life and happiness," the emphasis is put upon the truth which sets the soul free. For his practice with the sick had taught him that when a patient understood the real causes of his trouble the disease could be banished. The "explanation is the cure," he repeatedly said. This expla-nation involved the discovery of the inner or spiritual point of view. The emphasis being put upon the truth, Mr. Quimby did not make use of "denials," as the affirmations were later called by those who grasped this theory in part only. When the truth is seen, it is not necessary to deny its opposite. The error or "false belief" that led to the trouble was negative or destructive. The truth through which the cure was wrought was positive or constructive. What Mr. Quimby endeavored to do was to build up a different attitude toward life on the basis of principles which all could understand.

Mr. Quimby's departure from the point of view of his experiments therefore involved a radical change in attitude towards a patient. The mesmeriser or hypnotist merely tries to influence or control another's mind, as Quimby directed Lucius. But the spiritual healer regards himself as an organ of the divine life, a means only, not a controlling agent. He does not try to influence. He makes no attempt to control. He has no desire to control or manage. He regards himself as a lamp-bearer disclosing the way out of the dark places of the soul into the light of the divine wisdom. There can be no freedom and no cure unless the patient sees for himself. Thus Mr. Quimby was healer and teacher at the same time. Unless we un-derstand this two-fold office which he fulfilled, we are likely to misinterpret statements, such as the proposition that "disease is an error the only remedy for which is truth," and we are in danger of dismiss-ing many of his views as absurd.

To understand what Mr. Quimby meant is to see that he regarded every man in the light of the divine guidance. That is, there is divine wisdom for each of us, resident within us, accessible through intuition. Mr. Quimby was the friend of those who needed to be brought into relation with the divine within them. He sought the guidance for the individual in question, according to need, for the occasion. Naturally then there could be no mere formula or arrangement of words, no magic affirmation by which to dismiss a disease as with a gesture of command. There was no reason to deny either what the patient thought was his disease or the physical symptoms, to ignore the body or make light of the natural world. What was needed was a new point of view of all these things. The misinterpretation of symptoms would dis-appear with the acceptance of the true view. The bodily effect would be understood when the cause should become plain. The flesh would assume its proper place in the light of the new spiritual vision. Mr. Quimby aimed at nothing short of a religious or spiritual conversion such that the whole of life should appear under a different aspect. This wonderful work he wrought for his more responsive follow-ers. It is not surprising that they became his friends and found occupation for a lifetime in the develop-ment of his teachings.

There was one more discovery which we need to bear in mind in order to have Mr. Quimby's method completely before us. His practice with the sick in the early years while he was acquiring his method taught him that there is much more in the human mind than we are ordinarily or even at any time con-scious of. Not by any consent on our own part have we become the recipients of the beliefs, notions, and ideas which give us our erroneous views of life. We have taken them on from our mental environment. Our minds are fertile places in which beliefs germinate. The mind in this deeper, hidden sense, is indeed very much like the soil. It consists of spiritual substance, "spiritual matter" was Quimby's term at first. Its products directly influence us and our bodies without the intervention of the will. It is indeed uncon-scious or subconscious. But this hidden mind is accessible to the spiritual healer. Its contents can be dis-cerned. The hidden and disturbing influences can be brought to light. Changes wrought within it will become manifest in the body. It is in fact an intermediary between mind and body, an intermingling sub-stance.

In contrast with the beliefs discoverable in this hidden mind, Mr. Quimby in the constructive part of his treatment addressed himself to the "real man,'' the spirit, who needed to be summoned into power. He held that there is a part of the soul that is not sick, that is potentially or ideally one with God in image and likeness. For God did nut create man to be ill. He created him for health and freedom. Disease is the invention of man through misinterpretation of sensation, through judgments based on appearances, on symptoms, effects, externals. Health is ours by divine birthright, hence by implication in our very being in that "secret place" of the soul, that part of us that can never be ill. This element of our selfhood can be summoned into activity. We can become aware of it and begin to live by it. We can throw off our bond-ages. We can learn to live as God would have us live.

The silent spiritual treatment which was Mr. Quimby's chief discovery, his greatest gift to the world, consisted in a process of inner realization calculated to awaken this inner spiritual nature into exercise. The intuitive diagnosis with which the treatment began led the way to the main point, the centre of need in the patient. It disclosed the real as opposed to the apparent condition. It yielded the divine guidance for the occasion, according to the need. The spiritual realization then grew out of the intuitive discovery of the patient's inner state. It was made effective by Mr. Quimby's great power of concentration quick-ened by his consciousness of the divine wisdom, his practical way of realizing the presence of God. The treatment was spiritual rather than mental since the thought or idea was secondary to the power, the hu-man agent or organ secondary to the divine wisdom. Mr. Quimby had no way of his own to impose on another's mind. Hence his spirit was open to "the wisdom of the occasion."

In setting forth his method of treatment, Mr. Quimby always drew a distinction between the lower mind which he called "spiritual matter" (or substance), and the mind we might come into possession of by learning our true nature as spiritual beings. Thus he says in one of his articles, "My theory is founded on the fact that mind is matter; and, if you will admit this for the sake of listening to my ideas, I will give you my theory . . . All knowledge that is of man is based on opinions. This I call this world of spiritual matter. It embraces all that comes within the so-called senses. Man's happiness and misery are in his be-lief; but the wisdom of science is of God, and not of man. Now to separate these two kingdoms is what I am trying to do: and, if I succeed in this, I shall accomplish what never has been done. . . . I should never undertake the task of explaining what all the wise men have failed to do but for the want of some better proof to explain the phenomena that come under my own observation. . . . The remedies have never destroyed the cause, nor can the cause be destroyed by man's reason. . . .

"The world of opinions is the old world: that of science is the new; and a separation must take place, and a battle must be fought between them. Now, the science of life and happiness is the one that has met with the most opposition, from the fact that it is death to all opposers. It never compromises with its enemies, nor has it any dealings with them. . . . Its habitation is in the hearts of men. It cannot be seen by the natural man, for he is of matter; and the scientific man is not matter. All he has is his [spiritual] senses. There is his residence for the time. . . . It is almost impossible to tell one character from another, as both communicate through the same organs. As the scientific man has to prove his wisdom through the same matter that the natural man uses, he is often misrepresented. . . .This was where Christ found so much trouble in his days, for the people could not tell who was speaking."

Mr. Quimby described human life as a warfare between the spiritual power in man and the opinions which relate and bind him to the natural world. When he says, "My foundation is animal matter or life," he refers to the lower mind with its opinions. "This," he says, "set in action by Wisdom, produces thought. Thoughts, like grains of sand, are held together by their own sympathy, wisdom, or attraction." The natural man is composed of these groupings of ideas. "As thought is always changing, so man is always throwing off particles of thought and receiving others. Thus man is a progressive idea; yet he is the same man, although he is changing all the time for better or worse." That is, he changes in the direc-tion of the world with its opinions or towards God in His wisdom.

"Disease is the invention of man, and has no identity in Wisdom," that is, no place or purpose in the di-vine providence. It can be overcome because the mental life underlying it is of this lower mind which can be changed by the Wisdom which "decomposes the thoughts, changes the combinations, and pro-duces an idea clear from the error that makes a person unhappy or diseased." "Ideas have life. A belief has life . . . for it can be changed." Man is unwittingly a "sufferer from his own belief. . . . Our belief cannot alter a scientific truth, but it may alter our feelings for happiness or misery. Disease is the misery of our belief, happiness is the health of our wisdom, so that man's happiness or misery depends on him-self." The difficulty does not lie with sensation, for "sensation contains no intelligence, but is a mere dis-turbance which . . . is ready to receive the error, that is, respond to an erroneous interpretation. . . . Ever since man was created, there has been an element called error which has been busy inventing answers for every sensation."

Mr. George Quimby, in endeavoring to make clear this point of view, uses the following illustration: "Suppose a person should read an account of a railroad accident, and see, in the list of killed, a son. The shock on the mind would cause a deep feeling of sorrow on the part of the parent, and possibly a severe sickness, not only mental but physical. Now, what is the condition of the patient? Does he imagine his trouble? Is his body not affected, his pulse quick; and has he not all the symptoms of a sick person, and is he not really sick? Suppose you can go to him and say to him that you were on the train, and saw his son alive and well after the accident, and prove to him that the report of his death was a mistake. What follows? Why, the patient's mind undergoes a change immediately; and he is no longer sick. It was on this principle that Mr. Quimby treated the sick. He claimed that 'mind was spiritual matter,' and could be changed; that we were made up of truth and error; that disease was an error, or belief, and that the Truth was the cure. And upon these premises he based all his reasoning, and laid the foundation of what he asserted to be the 'science of curing the sick.' " *

* The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, p. 18.

In one of his articles, written in 1861, Mr. Quimby thus describes his method of cure: "A patient comes to see Dr. Quimby. He renders himself absent to everything but the impression of the person's feelings. These are quickly daguerreotyped on him. They contain no intelligence, but shadow forth a reflection of themselves which he looks at. This [mental picture] contains the disease as it appears to the patient. Be-ing confident that it is the shadow of a false idea, he is not afraid of it. Then his feelings in regard to health and strength, are daguerreotyped on the receptive plate of the patient. . . . The patient sees . . . the disease in a new light, gains confidence. This change is daguerreotyped on the doctor again . . . and he sees the change and continues . . . the shadow changes and grows dim, and finally disappears, the light takes its place, and there is nothing left of the disease."

A writer in the Jeffersonian of Bangor, Maine, in 1857, thus expounds Quimby's view: "A gentleman of Belfast, Maine, Dr. Phineas P. Quimby, who was remarkably successful as an experimenter in mesmer-ism some sixteen years ago, and has continued his investigations in psychology, has discovered, and in his daily practice carries out, a new principle in the treatment of diseases. . . . His theory is that the mind gives immediate form to the animal spirits, and that the animal spirit gives form to the body, as soon as the less plastic elements of the body are able to assume that form. Therefore, his first course in the treatment of a patient is to sit down beside him, and put himself en rapport with him, which he does without producing the mesmeric sleep.

"He says that in every disease the animal spirit, or spiritual form, is somewhat disconnected from the body, and that, when he comes en rapport with a patient, he sees that spirit form standing beside the body, that it imparts to him all its grief and the cause of it, which may have been mental trouble or shock to the body, as over-fatigue, excessive cold or heat. This of course impresses the mind with anxiety, and the mind reacting upon the body produces disease. . . .

"Dr. Quimby says that there is no danger from disease when the mind is armed against it. That he will treat a person who has the most malignant disorder without danger to himself, though his sympathy with the patient is so strong that he feels in his own person every symptom of the disease; but he dissipates from his mind the idea of it, and induces in its place an idea of health.

"He says the mind . . . is what it thinks it is, and that, if it contends against the thought of disease, and creates for itself an ideal form of health, that form impresses itself upon the animal spirit, and through that upon the body, that his understanding is a positive power, and aids the spirit, which is not strong enough in itself to contend against the idea of diseases." *

* The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, p. 22.

For the term "animal spirit" as used by this writer one should substitute the unconscious, the spiritual substance or "spiritual matter" of Mr. Quimby's later teaching, together with his teaching that the indi-vidual gives off a mental atmosphere as a rose gives off an odor by the discernment of which the healer can detect the patient's interior state; otherwise the above account gives an intelligible idea of the psy-chological aspect of the treatment. Mr. Quimby held that there is a spiritual body between the natural body and the human spirit. In this he agreed with seers of an earlier time, and pointed the way to the idea of the intimate correspondence between the spirit and the body. He did not teach that the spirit-forms of the departed occupy our bodies, or that disease in any of its forms is due to obsession.

Another interested observer wrote as follows in an article in the Portland Advertiser, February, 1860: "In every age there have appeared individuals possessing the power of healing the sick and fore-telling events. Their theory or explanation veils this power in superstition and ignorance, so that the world is not enlightened in regard to where it comes from or how it operates. We only know the effects. Spiritu-alists, mesmerists, and clairvoyants, making due allowance for imposition, in later times have proved that this power is still in existence.

"Like this in the vague impression of its character, but infinitely beyond any demonstrations of the same intelligence and skill, is the practice of a physician who has been among us . . . and to whose treatment some helpless invalids owe their recovered health. I refer to Dr. P. P. Quimby. With no reputation except for honesty, which he carries in his face, he has established himself in our city, and his success merits public attention. Regarded by many as a harmless humbug, by others as belonging to the genus mystery, he stands among his patients as a reformer, originating an entirely new theory in regard to disease, and practising it with a skill and ease which only come from knowledge and experience. His success in reaching all kinds of diseases, from chronic cases of years' standing to acute diseases, shows that he must be practising upon a principle different from what has ever been taught.

"His position as an irregular practitioner has confined him principally to the patronage of the credulous and the desperate; and the most of his cases have been those which have not yielded to ordinary treat-ment, Those only who have been fortunate enough to receive benefit from him can have any apprecia-tion of the interest which the originality of his ideas excites, and of the benefit, when understood, which they will be to society.

"To attempt to describe his mode of treatment to the well would be like offering money to an already wealthy man; while the sick person who is like one cast into prison for an unjust debt, can tell the force of his system. With a sympathy which the sick alone call forth, and a knowledge which he proves alone to them, he leads an invalid along the path to health. His power over disease arises from his subtle knowledge of mind and its relation to the natural world, to which his attention was turned some twenty years ago by mesmerism.

"His investigation in this region, hitherto unsatisfactorily explored, has developed in him a clairvoyant faculty, which he exercises with his reason and natural senses, and has yielded to him facts which he ex-plains upon a principle admitted, but little understood, educing therefrom a theory of universal applica-tion by which he cures disease."

This account, coming from one who had nothing to gain or lose, shows how Mr. Quimby's work was regarded when he began to practise in Portland. His deep sympathy for suffering humanity was noted by all. His work appealed to those who would be called credulous or those who had been given up by other practitioners, because they had the receptivity or willingness to try this method when other methods had failed. He impressed upon all who were sufficiently interested to inquire into his views the fact that he endeavored to put his work on the basis of intelligible explanation. Hence he sought to clear away all sense of mystery and to show that there was nothing akin to mediumship in the silent treatment. His own exceptional power, as a man was of course a factor in establishing a cure. Everybody who knew him has borne testimony to this power. But Mr. Quimby always insisted that the works he wrought could be re-produced. In fact, he held that spiritual healing would some time take place in less time, and by "word of mouth," when the underlying principle should be understood.

Still another writer, in an article in the Portland Advertiser, 1862, signing herself "Vermont," gives first-hand impressions of Mr. Quimby's method: "Many people who have lost faith in the ancient school are at the same time startled by such reasoning as Dr. Quimby uses with regard to disease. It is so contrary to the commonly received opinions, they hardly dare believe there can be any truth in it. They hear of remarkable success in his practice, but are still more incredulous, and say, 'The age of miracles has passed away, and this is too much to believe.' But 'seeing is believing,'. . .and after having an opportu-nity to see some of the remarkable effects which Dr. Quimby has had upon obstinate cases of long-standing disease, they are compelled to yield, although it may be reluctantly, that there is living truth in his principles, that he has cast off the shackles of opinion which would narrowly enclose the limits of investigation, and, studying the mysterious workings of the mind, discovered there the true explanation of that which has so long been misunderstood and unsatisfactorily accounted for. They came to him sus-picious, almost unwilling to believe what they saw, ignorant of his theory, which, even after it was ex-plained, they found difficult to understand, and therefore had to go through with this process of gradual conviction before they would receive its truths. So it may be said that he has to contend with those who would be his friends as well as his enemies. . . .

"According to this new theory, disease is the invention of man. It is caused by a disturbance of the mind . . . and therefore originates there. We can call to mind instances where disease has been produced in-stantly by excitement, anger, fear, or joy. Is it not the more rational conclusion that disease is always caused by influences upon the mind rather than that it has an identity, comes to us, and attacks us?

"Living in It world full of error in this respect, and educated to believe that disease is something we can-not escape, it is not strange that what we fear comes upon us. We take the opinions of men, which have no knowledge in them, for truth. So we all agree to arbitrary rules with regard to our mode of life, and suffer the penalties attached to any disobedience of the same. These diseases or penalties are real to us through the result of belief.

"It is reasonable to infer from these statements that the only way to approach and eradicate disease must be through the mind, to trace the cause of this misery, and hold up to it the light of reason or disbelief in the existence of disease independent of the mind. Then the cloud which shadows us vanishes, as error always will when over-powered by the light of truth.

"Dr. Quimby proves the truth of his belief by his daily works. The marvellous cures he is effecting are undeniable evidences of his superior knowledge and skill in applying it for the benefit of suffering hu-manity. He does not use medicine or any material agency, nor call to his aid mesmerism or any spiritual [spiritistic] influence whatever, but works on scientific principles, the philosophy of which may be un-derstood by the patient. . . .

"Accepting this new theory, man rises superior to circumstances. Easily adapting himself to any neces-sity, free from all fear of disease, he lives a more simple, natural, and happy life. He is enabled to con-trol the body, and make it subservient to his will instead of his being a slave completely at its mercy, which he will be if he allows that it is subject to disease. This truth is capable of extensive application in all the exigencies of life, and we learn to make constant use of it as we advance in knowledge. It helps us to place a just estimate upon everything, the value of life is enhanced; and, as we have more of this true knowledge in ourselves, we shall love and worship God, who is the source of all wisdom, more sin-cerely and intelligently." *

* The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, p. 29.

When we note that the writer of this clear statement of the possibilities of wider and wider application of Mr. Quimby's teaching went to Quimby as a patient suffering from a disease of long-standing and in every way a devotee of the older way of thinking about life and disease, we realize how great was the change sometimes wrought by his treatment and the conversations which followed. Here we have an in-dication at least of the spiritual effect produced by the change. We have a different attitude toward life, one that looks forward affirmatively to success. We note that the new teaching applies not only to dis-ease but looks beyond this to triumph over circumstances in general, in favor of a simpler, happier mode of life. It also gives a religious outlook, and in a very practical way directs attention to God as the im-manent source of all wisdom.

Speaking in general of those whom one has known well enough to see how radical was the change wrought under Mr. Quimby's treatment and instruction, it may be said that his greatest power came from the quickening sense of the divine love and wisdom which he carried in his presence. His method of sit-ting silently by the sick to learn the real state of the inner life as spiritual light should disclose it, enabled him to make the presence of God more vivid than it is ordinarily made by prayer and public worship. He was prompted by earnest desire to do good. His patients came to him in need, often in great distress of mind and body, sometimes at the point of death. He was aroused by this need and this desire to do his utmost, and was able fully to give himself to his work. His power increased with the years. His courage and faith strengthened him to persist in the new mode of healing despite the fact that he was alone and subject to adverse criticism on every hand. Under these circumstances it was natural that the spiritual consciousness which his presence inspired should be the really great result of his work.

Looking back over the years in the light of the good that has come from this work, we see plainly that sufficient power was with him to win this triumph and make this deep impression. The value of his work was on the side of power, in the impetus which he gave, an impetus sufficient to quicken those who were to transmit his ideas and methods, and apply them in their own way. This sense of power came from the fact that as a pioneer he found the great sources for himself and spoke from experience. What he communicated was life. His "theory," as he called it, was secondary to this. He did not impose his theory upon others or try to give it the authority of a "revelation." All those who have written about this theory in the papers have put their own construction on it to some extent. The early authors and teachers developed his views in their own way. But behind the various versions of his teaching was the strong evidence of his power and of his works. No one ventured to heal as he did while he continued in prac-tice, for no one had the confidence in view of his remarkable cures. The spiritual impetus, however, had been given, and in the course of time the results were seen.

When we look back over history we find that something like this has always been the result. The spiri-tual pioneer, sage or prophet, has accomplished the work, conveyed the impetus. Followers have ap-peared who gathered about the new leader, observed his work, acquired his ideas. Then after his death the spreading of his ideas variously stated and interpreted has begun. Some of the followers have been very loyal. Others have taken credit to themselves. There have been disputes, and eventually a scattering of forces or a division into sects has come about. The moral always has been: return to the sources, see what the original impetus was, put yourself in line with it and test it for yourself; pay little attention to the later effete restatements or the controversies, but try to grasp the spiritual truth and put this in rela-tion with other truths.

The further inference in the case of Mr. Quimby would be: return to the Bible to see if it be true that it contains an inner or spiritual meaning, to see if indeed there be a neglected science of the Christ in the New Testament, implying principles of universal application through spiritual healing. If so, this inner or spiritual truth may be the great truth of the new age, it may imply the second coming of the Lord in deepest reality. If so, let us look back of the superficial theories of merely mental healers to find touch anew with the original spiritual impetus. It need not concern us that so many have tried their hands at the spiritual interpretation of the Bible that there is a mere confusion of tongues. In the Bible itself there un-doubtedly is a science of spiritual things which all might understand alike. Mr. Quimby had at least the vision of it. His practice with the sick was in some measure at least a rediscovery of the original thera-peutic gospel. Its application to healing is a part only of the science which came to give men fulness of life. But healing had been the neglected part of the gospel. It was necessary that someone should arise to specialize upon this. Such in brief was the work given Mr. Quimby to do. This was the work he accom-plished with such impressive success.

Chapter 4 - THE FIRST AUTHOR

IN 1883, Mr. Quimby received as a patient one who was to accomplish a very important work in the promulgation of the new theory and practice of healing. This was Rev. Warren Felt Evans, of Clare-mont, New Hampshire. Mr. Evans had been in poor health for several years, having suffered from a nervous breakdown coupled with a chronic disorder that had failed to respond to the methods of treat-ment then in vogue. Having heard of Mr. Quimby's remarkable cures, he visited Portland on two occa-sions to receive treatment by the new method. His expectations were more than realized. Mr., Evans was not only healed of his maladies, but became so deeply impressed by the practice and teachings of the new therapeutist that he studied the new method and later began to apply it, having first developed the implied philosophy in his own terms. The turning-point came one day while in conversation with Mr. Quimby. Mr. Evans remarked that he believed he could cure by the same method and Mr. Quimby en-couraged him to think that he could. Accordingly, Mr. Evans made the venture as soon as opportunity offered, after his return home, and the first attempts were so successful that the way opened for him to devote the remainder of his life to authorship and the healing of the sick.

Mr. Evans, who was born in 1817 and died in 1889, was by profession a clergyman until this great change came into his life. He belonged to the New Church, and he appears to have been an average ex-ponent of Swedenborg's teachings, so far as one may judge by his writings, for example, The New Age and its Messenger, 1864, published after he visited Mr. Quimby, but surely written before, since it gives no evidence of any change of view. Mr. Evans was also well acquainted with philosophical idealism. He possessed the ability to grasp fundamental principles and think them out for himself. He had all the es-sentials, so far as spiritual principles were concerned; for the devotee of Swedenborg has a direct clue to the application of spiritual philosophy to life. What Mr. Evans lacked was the new impetus, to put two and two together. He lacked the method by which to apply his idealism and his theology to health. Mr. Quimby gave him this impetus. He possessed the method. Mr. Evans with ready perception saw the connection and was quick in his discernment of the values of the new practice.

Mr., Evans had given little evidence of originality in his earlier writings, since his chief interest was to spread knowledge of Swedenborg's doctrines. But in his first book on spiritual healing, or "mental sci-ence," as he sometimes called it, he branched out in a freer style of thought and undertook to win atten-tion for the new views without at first indicating their origin. In his second book, however, Mental Medicine, Boston, 1872, he ventures to use the phraseology he had acquired from Mr. Quimby and to mention the pioneer therapeutist by name. He Says:

"Disease being in its root a wrong belief, change that belief and we cure the disease. By faith we are thus made whole. There is a law here the world will sometime understand and use in the cure of the diseases that afflict mankind. The late Dr. Quimby, one of the most successful healers of this or any age, em-braced this view of the nature of disease, and by a long succession of most remarkable cures proved the truth of the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment. Had he lived in a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in his practice would have been deemed either mythical or miracu-lous. He seemed to reproduce the wonders of the Gospel history."

Rev. W. J. Leonard, in The Pioneer Apostle of Mental Science, Boston, 1903, says that one who knew Mr. Evans intimately "reiterates this sentiment in a letter to the writer . . . in the following words: 'In his estimation, Dr. Quimby was the highest authority in the science of healing, and a man of noble character and purest aims, which Dr. Evans believed were indispensably necessary to bring one into the perfect peace and the harmony with the Divine Life required to teach or heal the sick and suffering with suc-cess.' Not only was Dr. Evans fair enough to honor his master in the science, but, with the humility and modesty of the truly great soul, he made no attempt to claim that the truths he presented were absolutely new."

It is interesting also to read the testimony of one who knew both Mr. Quimby and Dr. Evans, who fol-lowed the latter's work with great interest, doing what was possible to make his books known in the world. In The True History of Mental Science, Mr. Julius A. Dresser says: "Dr. Evans obtained this knowledge of Quimby mainly when he visited him as a patient, making two visits for that purpose about the year 1883, an interesting account of which I received from him at East Salisbury in the year 1876. Dr. Evans had been a clergyman up to the year 1863, and was then located in Claremont, N. H. But so readily did he understand the explanations of Quimby, which his Swedenborgian faith enabled him to grasp the more quickly, that he told Quimby at the second interview that he thought he could himself cure in this way."

Mr. Evans' first book, The Mental Cure, Boston, 1869, is important for our purposes for several reasons. It was the first volume issued in our country on this subject. It was soon widely read in this country and Europe, where it was translated into several languages. It gave extensive publicity to the new ideas for the first time. It contains something like a demonstration of the truth of the principles for which it pleads, that is, by reference to facts and sound inferences based on facts; and it is still superior for this reason to most of the New Thought literature of today. More significant still, perhaps, from a historical point of view, is the evidence it gives of a transitional point of view. For while the author branches out freely and expounds Swedenborg's views in his own fashion, he is still largely dependent on the teach-ings of the Swedish seer and his interpretation is more sound. In Mental Medicine, 1872, and Soul and Body, 1875, all published before Science and Health, by Mrs. Eddy, Evans develops the same views in a supplementary way. But in the volume ordinarily referred to as his best book and the one which had most to do with giving shape to the New Thought, The Divine Law of Cure, 1881, Mr. Evans shows that he has been reading the philosophical idealists, and that he has changed his views to some extent, as we shall presently see.

Turning to The Mental Cure, we find him making liberal use of the teachings of Swedenborg concerning the influx of the divine life into the human soul, the theory of the relationship of mind and body, the cor-respondence of all things natural with all things spiritual, and the conception of causality as essentially spiritual. He does not draw upon the theological doctrines so much as on those which may be called in general spiritual. Adopting Swedenborg's psychology, he endeavors to verify this in his own way, and to substantiate his argument for spiritual healing by appeal to well-known physical facts and the principles of physiology.

We may summarize Mr. Evans theory as put forth in this volume as follows: The starting-point of all reason is with the idea of God, regarded as the source of all life in the universe and in the soul of man. The true science or philosophy would give us a complete view of things in the light of their causes, their relationship to and dependence on God. Man, created a form recipient of the divine life, is in inmost es-sence divine, and this divinity within him remains untainted whatever the vicissitudes through which man passes. In short, there is an inextinguishable divine spark which may be fanned into flame, despite all appearances to the contrary.

In actuality, however, man is very far from recognition of this his divine birthright and interior privilege. There is a blinded or disordered activity of the mind in its outward form. There is an antagonism be-tween the inmost essence and the selfhood of man as commonly regarded. Hence the mental and physi-cal unhappiness and misery through which man passes. Hence the need of distinguishing between hu-man nature as it was designed to be, as it ever is in the ideal sense of the word; and human nature in a state of moral, intellectual and physical disorder.

Very much depends, therefore, upon our knowledge of and insight into the human self in relation to God. The starting-point, always should be with the inner man, the spirit or soul. The life of the soul is received by influx from God, the source of all our life. All men are incarnations of the divine. "In all men the Divinity becomes finitely human." The soul receives its form from the divine spirit within. It is in the human form, yet the significance of this form is that it is made in the image and likeness of God. The mind is not then formless and insubstantial, as we sometimes say in our Ignorance; but it consists of real substance, that is, spiritual substance, and is definitely formed according to the divine ideal. Nor is the mind confined to the brain, or limited in form by the brain's substance and activity. The mind per-vades and is interfused throughout the body, and is coextensive with the physical organism. It thrills in every nerve and pervades every fibre. In brief, the body corresponds or answers to the spirit, and changes brought about in the spirit manifest themselves in the bodily organism; since mind or spirit is a higher, diviner force "approaching many degrees nearer the Central Life." We also see how this intimate relationship between soul and body is possible when we remember that matter with all its properties is merely a modification of force, and that all causality operating in physical force is spiritual in the last analysis.

Within the spirit itself there are orders and degrees. The spiritual degree, that is, our inmost nature, may and ought to control the natural degree, hence the animal instincts, the bodily activities which foster man's best estate. The spirit is endowed with both will and understanding. The understanding is recipient of the divine wisdom, the will receives the divine love. Thus love in us is central, fundamental. Love is our very life. When we act from love we act from the divine life in us. Love in this the higher or interior sense of the word is the "moving force of soul and body," the "hidden spring that moves life's machin-ery." The divine love within us may become "our fountain of health." If there is harmony between the will and the understanding, unity in the inner life, there is spiritual health, and if spiritual health then bodily health. Disease, in essence mental, not physical, is due to loss of balance between the understand-ing and the will, between the intellectual and affectional departments of our nature. In saying all this, Mr. Evans is adapting Swedenborg's psychology so as to find sure place for the truths concerning dis-ease and its cure which he has learned from Mr. Quimby.

Tracing out the discord between the will and the understanding which underlies disease, Mr. Evans fur-ther says that disease arises from some false idea which has become too prominent, some feeling that is inordinate or uppermost in such a way that conflict results and the body responds. To restore the balance is to cure the soul, hence the body. As every mental condition records itself in the body, when the state of mind is changed the bodily correspondence manifests it. In developing this view of the relationship of the soul to the body, Mr. Evans makes use of Swedenborg's teaching in regard to the spiritual body, which he interprets as the "seat of all sensation," agreeing with Quimby that the physical body in itself is destitute of feeling and intelligence.

Otherwise stated, sensation belongs, not to the bodily organs in which we seem to feel it, but to our "in-ner nature." The "inner form is the prior seat of all diseased disturbance in the body." Disease so-called is only an outward or visible effect of the inner disturbance. The symptoms are not the disease. The body is incapable of generating a disease by itself. Nor is disease an entity or force that seizes us from with-out. We cannot interpret the bodily condition correctly unless we see in it an outward expression of the inner state to which it corresponds.

Mr. Evans finds expression for Quimby's teaching that every one gives off a "mental atmosphere" which discloses the inner condition by adopting Swedenborg's view of "spiritual spheres." "This doctrine of spiritual spheres," he says, "is of great importance in mental philosophy, but has been almost wholly ig-nored. In the system of Swedenborg it has been given that prominence that belongs to it. Every angel, every spirit, every man, is surrounded by a spiritual sphere of affection and thought, or radiant circles of an emanating force, within which he imparts--often silently and unintentionally--his own feelings and ideas. . . . There are persons who exert a secret but powerful influence over those who come in contact with the sphere of their inner nature. This influence is good or bad, happy or depressing, elevating or degrading, according to the confirmed affectional state or ruling love of him from whom it proceeds. For it is to be borne in mind, that it goes forth primarily from the love which constitutes the soul life. If the mental state be joy or melancholy, gladness or sorrow, contentment or impatience, faith or fear, it affects others with a like feeling, in a degree proportioned to their impressibility. In this way the mind propa-gates its own prevailing condition, and all our mental states are contagious."

This is an intelligible statement of a point essential to Quimby's theory. If we were to take Quimby's statement that "disease is an error of mind" literally, it would doubtless seem absurd; for obviously we have not consciously thought ourselves into disease. But in Quimby's view we are unaware of the effect of our beliefs because ignorant of our whole deeper nature, that is, our impressibility, the growth of ideas within our minds, the influence of the mind on the body through the intermediate substance, the subtle influence of one mind on another through mental atmospheres, the power of the spirit to see through and master disturbing mental states by realizing the greater reality of man's true nature. If the later devotees of mental healing had taken account of all the factors noted by Quimby and explained so clearly by Evans in this his first statement of it, they would have inquired into the nature of spiritual in-flux and correspondence and would have adopted an essentially spiritual view of the whole field. Instead of a new "thought," instead of almost exclusive emphasis on suggestion or affirmation, we might have had a new spiritual philosophy embracing the larger truth of the new age.

Mr. Evans develops the idea of a spiritual cure by pointing out that as disease of body is caused by dis-ordered and morbid states of the spiritual life, so by inducing the opposite states disease can be over-come. What is needed in the first place is the power, such as Quimby possessed, "intuitively to detect the morbid state of the mind underlying the disease," and to see how to "convert the patient to a more healthful inner life." All disease in origin is an insanity. Its cure is the attainment of sanity. The problem is to know how to induce any desired mental state. Mr. Evans does not claim that this can be done by the human self alone. He does not put the emphasis on finite thought, or what would now be called "sugges-tion." The true order of life, he assures us, is that in which our hearts are open to "receive the influx of the divine and heavenly life," with a desire "to impart the good, with which we are blessed, to all who are willing to receive it. Such . . . is the normal state of every soul. It is evident we can never attain to the highest well-being of either soul or body, until we come into the divine order of our existence, and employ the activity with which we are endowed, according to the laws of the celestial life."

The central difficulty with us is that the divine impulse within us is "perverted in its action, our love terminates in self, and we become the centre of our universe." Selfishness then is the primary trouble, "the fruitful root of more moral and physical evil and unhappiness, than any other cause. . . . Disease is only a state of supreme selfishness." Even insanity, especially in the form of melancholia, is selfishness in its origin. Sexual emotion is another cause. In such emotion, when perverted, is the "root of more dis-eases of body and mind than can be traced to any other source. The sexual and conjugal love is most in-timately connected with the inmost life of the spirit, and is the fountain of more unhappiness or misery than originates with any other affection, according as it is properly controlled or left to a disorderly ac-tivity and indulgence.

In thus tracing matters to their fountain-source, taking his clue from Swedenborg, Mr. Evans anticipates Freud and his school by more than a generation. Freud has traced many if not most nervous disorders to repressions of the love-nature. Hence he places fundamental emphasis on the sexual instinct. But his view is purely psychological. It is developed out of the cruder facts of the inner life, arrived at through the interpretation of dreams. Mr. Evans gives us the whole context of the love-nature and shows its high origin on the spiritual side. From his point of view there could be no merely mental cure. The true cure would be, as Quimby had shown, in the discovery of our real inner nature as recipient of the divine life.

The theory of an essentially spiritual cure starts with the principle that there is but one source of life, that life emanates from this one living centre, from God, and is communicated to all, is communicable to others through us. The remedy for all our ills is at hand. "Make the heart of something outside your own being to leap for joy. Attune your soul in harmony with the Divine Life. Live to love, and then you will delight to live; and health will glow and thrill in every organic structure. Find someone whose condition is unhappily like your own. Lift up your hand and your heart, and pull down a blessing upon his head. . . . Be, like Jesus, everyone's friend. Seek to make everybody and everything happy. . . . Get well by cur-ing others. Impart life, communicate from your own stock of vital force to others, and life from God. . . ."

Faith is an important element in the cure. It is a "spiritual force that has accomplished wonders. . . . an actual psychological or spiritual force. To believe that we can do a thing, especially if that faith is the result of an understanding of nature's laws, empowers us to do it. To believe that we are well, or that we are going to become so, excites a spiritual force within us that goes far towards making us so. . . . The lack of faith is the loss of one of the essential elements of a sound mental state, which underlies, as a foundation, a healthy bodily condition. In the . . . healer it is a positive mental force, in the patient a re-ceptive mental state." Fear is its opposite, and produces equally striking effects in the generation of dis-eased conditions of the body. The healer should induce the spiritual state which drives out fear, should establish as a permanent possession the state which is the opposite of that causing the disease. The greatest motive power in this inducing of the desirable spiritual state is love, which sets the spiritual forces within us in operation. "Just as far as any one receives into himself the pure unselfish love of God--a love that in him is an irrepressible desire to communicate good--so far there is in him a power to impart life and health and peace to others."

Agreeing with Quimby, Mr. Evans finds the same method taught in the New Testament. "When," he says, "we assert that life is communicable . . . we occupy undisputed ground. It was in harmony with this recognized law of our being that Jesus cured diseased humanity. He laid down his life for men--an ex-pression that has no reference to his death . . . Jesus healed . . . first the mind, then the body. He removed the spiritual cause of disease, and the physical effect ceased. He carried his sanative influence into both departments of our being, the inner and the outer. This was none by the law of sympathy--a law of the mind that means more than the world has ever understood. By it one mind transmits its states of feeling and modes of thought to another. . . . Jesus thus imparted to the sick and wretched the calm happiness of his own loving and gentle heart. . . . In this way Christ carried his healing power into the realm of spiri-tual causes. He addressed himself as a spirit to the spirit of the patient."

Here we have the heart of the spiritual method as developed by Mr. Quimby. To address oneself as a spirit to another spirit is far more than merely to transfer thought or feeling to another. The element of feeling is a factor. Hence the strong emphasis which Mr. Evans puts upon sympathy. The intellectual element is also a factor, and Mr. Evans shows that there is a "sanative power in words," for example, in the affirmation, "I am strong," in such statements as, "Go in peace; Be of good cheer, thy sins are for-given thee; Be it unto thee according to thy faith." Here we find the factor which the New Thought peo-ple have made so much of since the days of writers like Henry Wood. But Evans always shows the supe-riority of the love-element, the divine influx into the heart. The right directing of the will seems to him more important than the use of such an affirmation as "I am strong." For he sees clearly that the disease springs from the inner life in general, not from mere belief; hence the cure must touch the whole spirit. To address oneself as a spirit to the spirit of the patient is indeed to rise to our highest privilege as a hu-man being.

In the preface to his Divine Law of Cure, 1881, Mr. Evans gives the clue to this his best known book as follows: "Idealism, which has always had strong hold upon the deepest thinkers of the world from Plato downward, is again coming into prominence . . . The system of Berkeley is undergoing a resurrection, and, in connection with the spiritual philosophy of Swedenborg, will have more influence than ever in shaping the metaphysical systems of the future, and in giving direction to the current of human thought. The present volume of the author is an attempt to construct a theoretical and practical system of phrenopathy, or mental-cure, on the basis of the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Its fundamental doctrine is that to think and to exist are one and the same, and that every disease is the translation into a bodily expression of a fixed idea of the mind and a morbid way of thinking. if by any therapeutic device you remove the morbid idea, which is the spiritual image after the likeness of which the body is formed, you cure the malady. The work lays no claim to originality except in the prac-tical application of idealism to the cure of the diseases of mind and body. It is the culmination of a life-long study of human nature, and to which the previous volumes of the author may be viewed as intro-ductory."

Mr. Evans plainly believed that this was his chief book. Whatever opinion we may hold concerning the change from his first book to this one, we must chronicle the fact that it was this applied idealism with its proposition that "to think and exist are one and the same" which has had great influence in the men-tal-healing movement. We here find Mr. Evans saying less about the larger view of man's spiritual na-ture, with its emphasis on will and the prevailing love or affection, and employing the terms which his later studies in idealism led him to adopt. Probably he did not intend to give up the spiritual in favor of the intellectual view. His practical method was surely as effective as before. By implication the term "thought" as he now uses it is as rich as the former terms, and when he now uses the term "mind" we may doubt whether he has given up the idea of the spirit which was central in the teaching of his first book. But unluckily everybody is influenced by language, and, unless we are extremely explicit, people fail to see that we mean something "spiritual" when we use psychological terms. Hence we note that the terminology of this book has sometimes been more influential than its spirit. This is an important point for our history.

Neglecting his former emphasis on the human spirit as recipient of power and life from the spiritual world, Mr. Evans now says, "Mind is the only active power in the universe . . . Mind is the only causal agent in the realm of matter, and certainly in the human body . . . As the body is the creation of the mind, and is always its ultimation or outward expression, a chronic disease is the fixedness of a thought, the petrifaction of a morbid idea. Thoughts or ideas are the most real things in the universe. They are the interior soul of things, and the underlying reality of all outward and visible objects. . . . The mind is the real man, and its thoughts act on the body as a spiritual poison, or as a mental medicine, for health and disease, in their spiritual essence, may be resolved into modes of thinking. A man is well so long as he thinks, feels. and believes himself so, for to be sick and not know it is all the same as not to be sick."

This is meant to be a profound doctrine, not the superficial one which it sometimes led to on the part of devotees of mental healing not so well-read as Mr. Evans was in the literature of idealism. When he says that "thought is a creative power," he does not intend to take anything from the thought of God as Crea-tor, he is not exalting the finite ego. He has in mind what he elsewhere in this book calls the "precon-scious," the term which he prefers to the "unconscious." By this he means "intelligent mental action be-yond the range of the external consciousness," our latent thought and intelligence.' He speaks of thought as the "grand characteristic of man," as belonging to the essence of the soul. He does not neglect what he has previously written about love as "the life of man," as Swedenborg affirms; but is more inclined to emphasize thought as "the existence or outward manifestation, of that vital element or principle." He re-gards the duality of the life of love as dependent on the character of man's thoughts. He interprets the self-determining power which we call free will to be "thought" in its essence. Hence everything depends for him upon man's power to turn his thoughts into another direction. Here Mr. Evans approaches the more recent psychological emphasis on attention as the determining factor in our mental life.

Having restated the entire theory of the origin and nature of disease with the term "thought" as central, Mr. Evans proceeds to a restatement of the mental cure. He bases his proposition that there is a "healing power of thought" on "the Hegelian principle that thought is a creative force." It is a "fundamental idea of Hegel's philosophy," he tells us, "that everything in its last analysis, or when we come to its inmost reality, is only a thought. What we call the external world and the human body, which is a part of it, are the thought of God, and we come to know them only so far as we think of them. They are revealed to us by the same power that creates them. Disease, like every other thing, is created, or, at least has an exis-tence only by thought. In the phrenopathic method of cure, it is a fundamental principle that thought is the ground of all reality."

One might neglect the bodily conditions of disease and almost come to believe that nothing exists save when we are thinking about it, if one were to take too seriously Evans' statement that a "thing, a world, a disease, comes into our consciousness only when we think of it." He seems to forget for the moment that our thinking about it has nothing to do with the existence of the world, that our consciousness is for the most part involuntary, and that nothing ceases to exist when we cease to think about it. If to "bring dis-ease into the realm of unconsciousness" be all that we need do to make it "unreal," it would indeed be a simple matter to banish all disease from the world.

Mr. Evans had offered a really fundamental view of disease in his first book, by tracing it to selfishness and showing that its cure means spiritual regeneration. He does not now speak of healing as the opera-tion of one spirit on another by drawing upon the inflowing life from the spiritual world. He still puts the emphasis on the divine mind, and by this he means the Spirit in all its fulness. But he speaks of the mind of the patient as a "clean slate on which our thoughts may be written," and says that what "we imagine, and believe, and think, will be transferred" to the patient; and so he tends to give prominence to the in-tellectual factors of the silent treatment. It would be easy for the superficial reader to seize upon "thought" as the dominant factor and overlook the spiritual meanings which Mr. Evans had previously given to the term.

In this volume as in his earlier books, Mr. Evans frequently quotes from Swedenborg, attributing to him the doctrine that "man is so made that he can apply life to himself from the Lord." He says that Sweden-borg viewed the external world as the ultimation of the spiritual universe. He also makes use of Swe-denborg's teaching in regard to spiritual influx and correspondence. But when he couples the name of Swedenborg with idealism, as he understands it, and says that "all time and space, as Kant and Sweden-horg affirm, are in ourselves--that is, within the enclosure of our spiritual being"; when he attributes our experience of space to "the space-creating power of the soul," Evans is reading subjective idealism into Swedenborg and throwing his readers upon the wrong track. He declares that "all the objects of nature are phenomena or appearances, as Hegel, Fichte, Berkeley, Swedenborg, and all the idealists affirm." He has been reading the idealists so much of late that he forgets his Swedenborg, who surely never taught that "all outward things are but the exteriorization of ideas." Nor did Swedenborg teach that "thought is the primal force and the greatest power in the world." He did not identify existence with thought, but characterized God as the "divine love and the divine wisdom," teaching that there are two powers in man recipient of these, the will and the understanding (the intellect). As thus recipient of life from God, man is primarily a spirit, spirit is substantial, and the body corresponds to the spirit. Swedenborg was not, properly speaking, an idealist, if by the term "idealism" we have in mind the idealism of Fichte and Hegel. Swedenborg's works lead the reader into the objectivism of our true relationship in the spiritual world. They put the emphasis on love, hence on conduct, and avoid over-emphasis on human thought.

The distinction is important. For if, taking seriously Evans's declaration that to think and exist are one and the same, we follow his theory of disease and its cure, we are likely to acquire a psychology without a body, we are apt to think too lightly of the natural world and to make the road to salvation appear eas-ier than it is. To see that for the time being Evans is interested in the theoretical and on the whole im-practical idealism of Fichte, is to realize that he is temporarily neglecting the spiritual philosophy of Swedenborg with the clue to Quimby's teaching it gave him in the early years. There was really no rea-son to "attempt to construct a theoretical and practical system of phrenopathy, or mental-cure, on the basis of the idealistic philosophy." Mr. Evans already possessed a better philosophy. He did not improve either his terminology or his practical method by the change. What he did do was to mark out the way of thinking which devotees of mental healing in the mental-science period followed by emphasizing thought as "creative," as the greatest force in the world. The universe became less substantial for the mental healer as a result. The mental doctrine became the popular one. The profounder view of the spiri-tual life of Mr. Evans's first book was for the most part neglected. Readers of Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health found a somewhat similar interpretation of the idealism of Berkeley in her writings. Thus in the mental-science period preceding what is now known as the New Thought, both those who began with Evans and those who started with Mrs. Eddy arrived at much the same conclusion; the universe lost for them a part of its reality, and the process of working back to the profounder view was made difficult.

Chapter 5 - THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

IT is important to give brief attention at this point to the origin of Christian Science, since the therapeu-tic movement as a whole has felt the influence of this the most radical view during the past forty years. Moreover the testimony of Mrs. Eddy to Quimby's work and teaching is significant. It gives us another interpretation. It puts us in touch with a line of thought which competed with Mr. Evans's teaching in producing "mental science," the forerunner of the New Thought. We can hardly follow the later history intelligibly unless we have all the clues in our possession. We undertake this part of our inquiry in the spirit of the truth-seeker, without any desire to enter into a controversy regarding the indebtedness of one leader to another. We may bring forward the chief facts and leave them to speak for themselves.

In The True History of Mental Science, which was originally a lecture delivered in Boston at the request of people who wished to know the relationship of the various phases of the therapeutic movement to one another, Mr. Julius A. Dresser says:

"Among those who were friends as well as patients of Mr. Quimby during the years from 1860 to 1865, and who paid high tributes to his discoveries of truth, and the consequent good to many people and to the world, was one who, for some strange reason, afterward changed and followed a different course, with which you all are more or less familiar. I refer to the author of Science and Health. As she had dur-ing several years special opportunities to know the man and to learn truth of him, this record would be incomplete without including her testimony at that time. Fortunately it can be given in her own words; and you can form your own estimate of them.

"When the lady became a patient of Quimby, she at once took an interest in his theory, and imbibed his explanations of truth rapidly. She also took a bold stand, and published an account of her progress in health in a daily paper. The following is an extract from her first article thus published, which appeared in the Portland Evening Courier in 1862: