When one versed in the natural sciences examines Christian Science, he finds a radical distinction. In the physical sciences, rational systems are constructed on observations made with the bodily senses; whereas Christian Science is founded on spiritual sense. The inquirer may never have recognized spiritual sense in his experience, and thus he may question whether a system so based can really be scientific.
Yet spiritual sense is an integral part of existence. By spiritual sense, with significance beyond bodily sensations of pleasure and pain, we distinguish between good and evil. Every effort to meet the standards of truth and integrity is based ultimately on acknowledgment of a spiritual criterion of good which transcends mere social morality. The faith of the scientist that natural phenomena are governed by orderly, exact laws which can be ascertained by research is founded on the spiritual perception, often unrecognized, that the universe is controlled by a principle. This faith implies a belief that reality is the outcome of a principle, and it is natural to classify ultimate Principle as divine, capitalizing the word to identify it with Deity.
It is not surprising that spiritual sense is not yet more widely recognized. For many centuries the beauty of towering mountain ranges went unnoticed in the western world, and men considered them chiefly as obstacles to commerce. It took the perceptiveness of poets and artists to reveal their loveliness to human thinking. Even now the beauty of desert regions is just becoming widely recognized by mankind. If the human consciousness has been so widely blind to this element of its material environment, a characteristic inherent not in the optical communication of landscape to consciousness but in the quality of thinking which composes consciousness, it must be admitted that increased awareness may reveal a whole universe of concepts hitherto unsuspected.
