What knowledge would be available to us without sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch? Could we experience materiality, or even know of an existence in a corporeal body?
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, states, “All human knowledge and material sense must be gained from the five corporeal senses” (p. 532). The converse of that statement is, if we had no corporeal senses, we would have no human knowledge nor a material sense of things. So, when we gather data through the five physical senses, we end up only with human opinions about ourselves and our world. This corporeal, material sense of ourselves is described in the teachings of Christian Science as “mortal man.”
Information gained from the five senses not only informs an individual’s belief system, but also informs the collective belief of universal mortal consciousness, which is defined in Christian Science as “mortal mind.” Commonly held beliefs about heredity, contagion, sin, sickness, disease, discord, and death are accepted by mortal mind as laws that condemn mortal man to suffer. Consequently, a person believing he or she is governed by mortal mind becomes trapped by this mind’s circular reasoning of drawing conclusions about itself from itself, which limits its knowledge to the material senses.
