IN answering the question, "What are body and Soul?" Mrs. Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 477) begins with a definition of identity as "the reflection of Spirit, the reflection in multifarious forms of the living Principle, Love." This statement provides an invaluable corrective for the widespread but mistaken belief that would identify man with a more or less material soul, supposedly resident in a completely material body, and would saddle him with the inevitable consequences—sin, disease, disaster, death. For since man is the reflection of Spirit, he is not partially but wholly spiritual and perfect, since original and reflection are alike in nature and quality.
Man's identity as reflection fixes his perfection as an eternal fact, not subject to chance or change, since he manifests all the qualities of God, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. True progress consists in the development or unfolding to human consciousness of this forever fact; and just in the proportion that we apprehend and acknowledge man's permanent spiritual identity, shall we overcome the disabilities seemingly imposed on mankind by the fluctuations of time, place, and circumstance.
The concept of identity needs to be complemented by that of individuality. A group can be divided into units, which from their very nature cannot be further divided; each unit is an individual, distinct from its neighbors. If ideas were not thus differentiated one from another, we should have, instead of Science, order, and law, a formless confusion, in which, as our Leader says (Science and Health, p. 507), "creation would be full of nameless offspring,—wanderers from the parent Mind, strangers in a tangled wilderness."
