Our human environment includes many things. Some are trees, grass, flowers, animals, buildings, and machines. Of all these there are many varieties. When one becomes a student of Christian Science and begins to understand that Mind is All, and reality is Mind and its ideas, the question naturally arises as to what is the explanation of these things about us. What is the spiritual fact in regard to them? How are they related to man?
First, we need to see that there is no more connection between the temporary, material phenomena of mortal mind — though often they are presently useful and sometimes transiently beautiful — and the permanent ideas of divine Mind than there is between a mistake and the fact it misrepresents. A counterfeit dollar may hint the existence of a real dollar, but it cannot define the substance or quality of the real. Furthermore, a counterfeiter sees the dollar he counterfeits, but mortal mind never sees, or knows aught of, the spiritual identities whose opposites it evolves.
Mary Baker Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 74), "There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, and the physical, or corporeal." There is no bridge between God's ideas and material concepts. The basic error, mortal mind, embracing all its concepts, is of itself, by itself, and to itself, and its concepts dwell only in the realm of supposition.
