Page:Science and Health.djvu/444

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440
SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

regard to the case, and his state of mind is communicated to the patient, whether verbally or otherwise. While we vainly suppose the sick feel the effects only of thoughts expressed, they feel more surely the unexpressed fear, doubt, or anxiety, inasmuch as it is more intense. The scientist, understanding how mind alone forms every condition of matter, gives courage and strength to the patient while imparting to his understanding the Truth of being that destroys error, and restores the limb without stiffness, displacement, or unnatural formations; whereas the surgeon's similar case will terminate, if not fatally, in some unnatural condition of the joint. Understanding the cause of disease wholly mental, a scientist will never for a moment admit general opinions regarding it, or take physical symptoms into account, except as mental conditions or beliefs to be destroyed through mind.

Personal sense and science clash, of course, in this statement, for they are opposites and without affinity, and this quarrel will wax warmer until it is over, and sense yields to science. Pride, ignorance, prejudice or passion will close the door on science until future centuries open it wide to man, and he regains the harmony of being. If Life and Intelligence depend on organization, man is material; and stop the functions of the body, or let the body be spiritual, and man is annihilated; and there must be a new creation of man. If Life escapes from matter it is not Spirit, and must return again to matter, in which case there is no spiritual existence. If material existence is real, the spiritual is unreal, and vice versa; if Life is matter, or in matter, it cannot continue outside of matter; and material decomposition