In her book "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, states a proposition which she terms "the leading factor in Mind-science." It is this: "Mind is All and matter is naught." The entire quotation reads (pp. 108, 109), "My discovery, that erring, mortal, misnamed mind produces all the organism and action of the mortal body, set my thoughts to work in new channels, and led up to my demonstration of the proposition that Mind is All and matter is naught as the leading factor in Mind-science."
"All" and "naught" are absolute and unequivocal terms. "All" necessarily designates all-inclusive existence, or Life; thus nothing else exists. "Naught" is derived from Anglo-Saxon terms meaning not ever anything; hence "naught" means nothing.
While the proposition "that Mind is All and matter is naught" is altogether contrary to the general appearance of things and may seem radical and revolutionary in the extreme, it is essentially a restatement of Christ Jesus' words (John 6:63), "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing." In his teaching and preaching Jesus employed objects and phenomena familiar to all—flowers, birds, fields—as illustrative and indicative of the spiritual facts and laws which were the basis of his healing and regenerative ministry. His illustrations and lessons are as helpful and potent today as ever, and it is their revealings and the subsequent experiences of mankind which have prepared the human mind for a still more intimate analysis and appraisal of individual experience and an appreciation of the altogether mental nature of all being.
