here, the more are we separated from the world; and should this rule fail hereafter, and we grow more material, and so come back to the world? When I was told the other day, “People say you are a medium,” pardon me if I smiled. The pioneer of something new under the sun is never hit: he cannot be; the opinions of people fly too high or too low. From my earliest investigations of the mental phenomenon named mediumship, I knew it was misinterpreted, and I said it. The spiritualists abused me for it then, and have ever since; but they take pleasure in calling me a medium. I saw the impossibility, in Science, of intercommunion between the so-called dead and the living. When I learned how mind produces disease on the body, I learned how it produces the manifestations ignorantly imputed to spirits. I saw how the mind's ideals were evolved and made tangible; and it matters not whether that ideal is a flower or a cancer, if the belief is strong enough to manifest it. Man thinks he is a medium of disease; that when he is sick, disease controls his body to whatever manifestation we see. But the fact remains, in metaphysics, that the mind of the individual only can produce a result upon his body. The belief that produces this result may be wholly unknown to the individual, because it is lying back in the unconscious thought, a latent cause producing the effect we see.
“And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils.” The word devil comes from the Greek diabolos; in Hebrew it is belial, and
