As one follows, through history and mythology, the changing vagaries of the human mind down to the present day, one cannot fail to be impressed with the striking similarity of its repeated experiences. The same blindness, the same inability to learn from experience, the same tendency to form vain images from which it subsequently must flee in terror, characterize all its history. Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 186), "If mortal mind knew how to be better, it would be better;" but being in reality only ignorance, or the absence of Mind, it can neither be better nor learn better; it must indeed be "put off," replaced by divine Mind, the infinite intelligence, before peace and healing can come to a long-suffering world.
This replacement is, of course, a gradual process, but as, little by little, intelligence takes the place of non-intelligence, and fear gives way to love in the individual consciousness, the positive nature of good begins to be recognized, and slowly but surely the sense of evil in the world is seen to lessen. It is at most but a sense of evil, a negative quality, which must disappear before the omnipresence of good as does darkness before the sunlight.
Being by its very nature nonintelligent, it is not surprising that the human mind, so called, is eternally being fooled. From the beginning of time it has mistaken evil for good and ignored the real and substantial while clinging to the unsubstantial. To such a sense of things Spirit is necessarily evanescent, misty nothingness, entirely intangible and vague, and spirituality cannot therefore appear to be particularly desirable. The idea of spiritual man as real and substantial yet without a single quality of discord or decay is wholly incomprehensible to it.
