Many statements in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy are so arresting, incisive, pungent—so contrary to generally accepted human opinions—that they tend to set us back on our heels when we encounter them. But through them all there is a luminous atmosphere of love. We see that she is striving constantly to help the reader see man's true spiritual identity and to help him reject, from this higher standpoint, the limiting, disease-producing material belief that man is merely an animal with a mind or ego of his own separate from God, infinite Spirit, the one universal Mind or Ego.
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures she makes this short, blunt, but tremendously important statement: "The I is Spirit." Science and Health, p. 249; Just think of it!—not a little "I" called you, not a tiny personal spirit or mind called "me," but, as the Bible implies, just one infinite Spirit, one boundless self conscious Ego, in whom we live and who imparts all the life, intelligence, and action we possess.
In reality, then, all that can say "I" is the intelligent, creative Principle of the universe. Our real, spiritual selfhood is genuinely self-conscious because it individualizes the intelligence of the All-Mind, the only Ego. Man can say "I" only because he reflects the self-knowledge of God.
