A KITTEN seeing its reflection in a polished surface attempts to play with the advancing and retreating image. Observing these antics, one realizes that the kitten takes for objective reality its own playful reflection. In a manner somewhat analogous the human mind, unacquainted with spiritual realities, perceives its own beliefs mirrored in the form of material personality and a material sense of existence and believes them to be identity, substance, life, and intelligence. It classifies as real that which it cognizes by the physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.
Our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, with inspired wisdom writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 337), "Material personality is not realism; it is not the reflection or likeness of Spirit, the perfect God." It is only through a spiritualized consciousness, wherein God is recognized as Spirit, Mind, and man as reflecting the divine nature, that true realism can be found.
One must first perceive in some degree "the reflection or likeness of Spirit, the perfect God," man created and maintained in God's image and likeness, in order to effect his escape from the bondage of a foundationless reliance upon material personalities. This spiritual view of man is basic to the scientific realism which apprehends the universe of God's creating, peopled with divine ideas, imperishable identities.
