The publication of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy introduced Christian Science, a spiritually rational system with profound practical consequences, to a wide public. This Science presents to the natural scientist a radical view of reality, and to the traditional religionist a scientific theology; it provides the foundation for resolving the differences between these two fields. It adduces evidence of the operation of spiritual law—evidence largely neglected since the early days of Christianity—and it insists on proof of its propositions in the test of experience. It elevates science out of materiality and frees religion from the mystery that had deprived it of healing vitality and made it vulnerable to the perversions of inhuman persecutions and religious wars.
The three decades after the first edition of Science and Health appeared (1875—1906) were years of extraordinary ferment in scientific thought, shaking its very foundations. The sharp, simplistic mechanism of earlier views of the atom began to yield to what was to be called the "uncertainty principle" of quantum mechanics, while biologists were absorbed in disputing the implications of evolution.
In physics, the deterministic viewpoint inherited from Newton and others was under attack. It had been believed that scientific laws might be deduced from experimental findings alone. The basic suppositions that the world consists of matter and obeys exact material laws were not even recognized as postulates, a neglect largely persisting to this day. Using Newton's laws, physics had developed into a comprehensive structure that seemed to explain the entire realm of nature on a mechanical or electromechanical basis, and attempts were under way to interpret the atom on the same basis.
