The assertion so repeatedly made in the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," that the material senses are deceptive in their cognition of things, causes surprise to many who read it for the first time. Some query, "Is this true? Can it be that the source of knowledge to which we have all our lives been accustomed to trust, has deceived us, and that we may no longer gather information therefrom?" Others denounce the claim as untrue, and declare that if man may not trust to the material senses for his knowledge of things, he is wholly without the means of acquiring information or wisdom.
The idea that the material senses do not correctly cognize things has always had some place in the philosophical world, but it was never elaborated into any definite system, or so presented as to set the world to thinking of it, whether it would or not, until Mary Baker G. Eddy wrote and published the Christian Science text-book. This book so courageously and insistently asseverates this philosophical tenet that it becomes verily a pivotal point.
This being true, and it being further true, that a great religious movement whose rapidly increasing numerical force, and unparalleled works in healing sin and sickness, are astonishing the age, has been built up with this tenet as its corner-stone, is it strange that philosophers, scholars, theologians, physicians, educators, and publicists, as well as the world's great rank and file, are pausing and thinking? Nay, that many of them are seriously inquiring if this philosophy be indeed true; while yet many others have investigated to the point where they are prepared to say out of their own deep experience, Yea, verily it is true?
