THE fundamental teaching of Christian Science is that "all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all" (Science and Health, p. 468). Mrs. Eddy made this declaration of truth more than thirty years ago,—made it boldly in the face of a materially-minded world wherein matter seems substance and the laws of physics manifested through its mediumship seem inviolate. There is, however, a rude shock in store for any one who begins the search for knowledge by an investigation of the knowing process.
The realization has dawned that we live in a purely mental world. While we know many facts about many things, knowing, in and of itself, is always a mental process; therefore all our knowledge about the manifold universe must be in terms of thought for us to know it at all. Objects are presented to consciousness in the form of concepts. So inexorably true is this that, philosophically speaking, no one has ever known anything outside the circle of his own consciousness. He lives in his own mental world, which differs more or less from his neighbor's mental world. This is true for the "common-sense" people who dub their mental experience a "material universe," as well as for those who understand the situation.
The surprises have only begun, however, for the dweller in matter. He must learn that the senses, through which he thought he drank in information about objects and their activities, tell him nothing about objects or activities at all; that they can speak, each of them, but one tongue: sight can speak of color (of which the awareness of form and motion is an accompaniment), and of nothing else; hearing can speak of sound, and of nothing else, and so on. Moreover, color and sound, he learns, are mental translations, not physical facts. The world of sense, in mental experience, begins and ends here in an incoordinated mass of crude impresses having no innate power of association, the ear forever unaware of the eye's world of activity, the eye equally oblivious of the experiences of its neighbor, the nose.
