Varying opinions have obtained among Christian scholars in all ages as to the character and value of the service philosophy has rendered the human mind in its effort to attain to absolute truth. Philosophy is the imperial highway along which the pagan intellect has marched with its most stately tread and along which are to be found the memorials of its greatest achievements. Yet these memorials are mostly broken columns, danger signals at best, which point not the way to any positive truth. Still, philosophy has rendered religion important service, though of a purely interpretative and negative character. Its real office is to uncover error. It uncovered polytheism to the Greek or gentile mind, anthropomorphism to the Jewish mind, and is uncovering the errors of sense to the modern Christian mind. It has been called the handmaid of religion, and so long as it serves and does not attempt to usurp the place of inspired truth, it may render valuable assistance; but whenever it begins to mock or revile the higher sense, the injunction has invariably come, "Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son."
As Paul says of the law, philosophy may be our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, but there it must leave us, as they left the helpless paralytic, at the feet of Jesus. This illustrates the difference between Christian Science and every human system. Christian Science is demonstrable Christianity. It not only uncovers and destroys sin, sickness. and error of every kind, but it saves the victim from their consequences. Being demonstrable science, it is not concerned about the speculations of any human system. The glory of the age is that one has been found whose fitness for that exalted commission has enabled her to restore this healing and saving truth which for centuries has lain buried beneath the rubbish of scholasticism. As the gospels of John and Paul were not affected by the systems of philosophy prevalent in their day, so the restoration of this gospel truth through Christian Science is not concerned with the question of whether it does or does not agree with the human systems of this age. This does not mean that Christian Scientists are any less ready to honor the great thinkers of all ages; for as there are no people who better understand the power and significance of thought, so there could be none more ready to honor its great historic exponents. But it is truly pathetic to witness how these great beacon lights to struggling human thought have been misinterpreted and misunderstood by those whose pathway they hoped to illumine, just as Christian Science is being misinterpreted and misunderstood by those whom it was intended to bless. Only recently, and very much to my surprise, I read in Mr. Huxley's life of Hume this statement in regard to Hume's philosophy: "It is hardly necessary to point out that the doctrine just laid down is what is commonly called materialism. But it is nevertheless true that the doctrine contains nothing inconsistent with the purest idealism." Much depends on the standpoint from which one is viewing the matter under consideration: whether from the standpoint of a physicist who deals with phenomena as his only reality, or from that of a metaphysician who goes deeper to find the reality, or real truth, behind all physical phenomena. In this connection I am tempted to quote from the late John Fiske's "Crumb for the 'Modern Symposium,'" as follows:—
"The untrained thinker, who believes that the group of phenomena constituting the table on which he is writing has an objective existence independent of consciousness, will probably find no difficulty in accepting this sort of materialism. If he is devoted to the study of nervous physiology, he will be very likely to adopt some such crude notion, and to proclaim it as zealously as if it were an important truth, calculated to promote, in many ways, the welfare of mankind. The science of such a writer is very likely to be sound and valuable, and what he tells us about woorara-poison and frog's legs, and acute mania, will probably be worthy of serious attention. But with his philosophy it is quite otherwise. When he has proceeded as far in subjective analysis as he has in the study of nerves, our materialist will find that it was demonstrated, a century ago, that the group of phenomena constituting the table has no real existence whatever in a philosophic sense. For by 'reality' in philosophy is meant 'persistence irrespective of particular conditions and the group of phenomena constituting a table persists only in so far as it is held together in cognition. Take away the cognizing mind, and the color, form, position, and hardness of the table—all the attributes, in short, that characterize it as matter—at once disappear. . . . Apart from consciousness there are no such things as color, form, position, or hardness, and there is no such thing as matter. This great truth, established by Berkeley, is the very foundation of modern scientific philosophy; and, though it has been misapprehended by many, no one has ever refuted it and it is not likely that any one ever will."
Some of the more scholarly critics of Christian Science appear to think that, in some way, we receive through sense-perception important intelligence of the existence of a matter world, for they refer to the data which perception is supposed to furnish us as though it were entitled to a high degree of credit. But a sense-perception is not a perception of any thing; it is merely a state of consciousness, the crude beginnings of a mental process which gives us our objects. A sense-perception is simply a sort of unintelligible form of mental awareness. Sense-perceptions have no value for our intelligence until they receive mental interpretation, and then they become mental concepts.
One critic, who is fond of citing Kant and other philosophers, contends that although material objects may not appear to us as they really are, still they are material objects of which we have inadequate conceptions. But Kant says, in his Inaugural Dissertation: "By our sensibility we do not know the nature of things confusedly. We do not know it at all. Apart from our subjective condition, the object, as represented and qualified by our sensibility, is nowhere to be found. It cannot possibly be found, since its form, as phenomenal appearance, is determined by those very subjective conditions."
Inasmuch as Kant is so often referred to in this connection, and is really the great epochmaking philosopher of modern times, all postKantian systems being projected largely along lines marked out by him, it may be well to consider briefly what his teaching is on the point at issue.
The indisputable fact is, that Kant not only taught nothing to warrant the assumption of the existence of matter, but the fundamental laws of thought laid down by him, upon which alone he considered human experience possible, preclude all possibility of any knowledge of such an existence. So long as Kant confined his thinking to the domain of pure Mind all difficulties appeared to vanish before the processes of his invincible logic; but when he came to take some account of our sense experience he found it quite impossible to apply the laws or categories of mind to the crass material of sense in a way that could be said to give us knowledge of objects or a universe such as this experience seemed to demand. He found that the laws of pure thought absolutely refused to work when applied to data furnished by the senses. In short, he found what Father Abraham told the materialist in the parable, and what every philosopher of note has found since, viz., that between Mind and matter, between the abode of Spirit and the realm of the material, there is a great gulf, fixed and impassable. So Kant hit upon a scheme for effecting at least a semblance of mediation between the two, through the constructive activity of the imagination; that is, according to Kant, the mind constructs through the imagination a sort of hybrid world, the objects of which, while mental concepts, yet partake of a material or sensuous character. This is the world we seem to know through our senses. This world of sensuous mental concepts, this hybrid product of a corrupted imagination, is the nearest approach to a matter world known to philosophy, and is the only world known either to physical science or to materia medica.
Hermann Lotze, of more recent date, the great Christian philosopher of Germany, agrees with Kant that the objects of our knowledge are not real things, but are mere appearances, phenomena of thought, which do not even remotely suggest the true appearance or nature of things; he agrees with Kant also that we cannot know things as they really are, except that he thinks we are justified in drawing the metaphysical inference from self-consciousness that things are spiritual or soullike beings.
Another critic quotes Kant as saying, "A dream which all dream together, and which all must dream, is not a dream, but reality." True; and it would be just as much a reality if any one must dream it, as if all dreamed it together. Such a phenomenon would be real, a real phenomenon, as real as anything in God's universe; it would have all the reality that phenomena can have; viz., the reality of manifesting reality. But its, reality would consist in its being a manifestation, expression, or fulfilment of the laws of being,—in manifesting the reality of being, and not in the fact that a great many people, or all people, were dreaming the same dream, any more than the world would be flat if all the people had kept on believing it to be flat. Thus Christian Science notes the difference between real phenomena and pseudophenomena. A thing is not unreal because it is phenomenal. All the reality there is, except God, is phenomenal. It follows that all things have reality just in proportion, or to the extent, that they manifest this one absolute reality or being; viz., God, Mind, Principle, Truth.
A thing is not real because it appears or claims to be real, any more than it is true because it appears or claims to be true. Two times three are four is not any more real than it is true,—it has not a whit more reality in it than truth; it is not a real belief any more than it is a true belief; it is not an event, not an occurrence, it cannot occur! It is just as psychologically unreal as it is mathematically unreal, and it is just as psychologically unreal as it is psychologically untrue. A belief is a phenomenon of the human mind, and is a real belief only as it manifests the reality known as Mind; but Truth, Mind, and Principle are convertible terms, and a belief can manifest the reality of Mind only according to Principle; that is, as it manifests also the reality of Truth. Therefore a false belief has no reality even as a belief,—it is a nonentity, just as nothing as is two times three are four. To have reality as belief it must be a belief of some mind; but as the individual mind is itself a phenomenon of the one Mind, and is mind only to the extent that it manifests this Mind, it cannot manifest a false belief, since to that extent it would not be mind. But, says our critic, a false belief must be something, even as an illusion it must have some reality. Yes, I admit that it does seem to have a degree of reality, just as the expression "nothing" gets to be regarded by us as standing for something, even the somethingness of nothing. It is, however, but a trick of what, for convenience, we may be permitted to call the human or mortal mind,—this hypostasis of words; something like what John Stuart Mill probably had in thought when he wrote: "Now, as soon as a distinguishing name is given, though it be only to the same thing regarded in a different aspect, one of the most familiar experiences of our mental nature teaches us that the different name comes to be considered as the name of a different thing." And, "All experience attests the strength of the tendency to mistake mental abstractions, even negative ones, for substantive realities." (See his criticism of Sir Wm. Hamilton's philosophy.)
There can be no doubt but that our principal philosophers all hold that Spirit, or Mind, is the only reality; and they freely use the analogy of a dream to illustrate the condition of our present sense existence, although her critics seem never to tire of trying to ridicule Mrs. Eddy for making a similar use of it. The basis of the Leibnitzian philosophy is thus stated: "Spirit is the sole reality, and Spirit is activity." And Fichte says of Kant, "His work was thus critical rather than constructive. It was to break up the hard and crude notions that men had of a solid, material world, wholly independent of spiritual presence, and to substitute for this the thought of an ideal world, which is for and of the spirit alone."
There has been such astounding ignorance displayed by the self-constituted critics of Christian Science, ignorance not only of Christian Science but of all science and all philosophy, that it might have a pacifying effect on some of them to know that the fundamentals of its philosophy have been declared to be perfectly rational and allowable hypotheses, by no less authority than Immanuel Kant himself. Not only so, but he approves and commends them as an efficient weapon to be used in defending the Church's most fundamental and most important doctrine. In the Paralogisms of the Pure Reason (Heinze) kant says,—
"And against other criticisms of the doctrine of Immortality one may adduce the transcendental hypothesis:—
"All life is essentially only intellectual and not subject to time changes, neither beginning with birth nor ending with death. This world's life is only an appearance, a sensuous image of the pure spiritual life, and the whole world of sense only a picture swimming before our present knowing faculty like a dream, and having no reality in itself. For if we should see things and ourselves as they are we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures with which our entire real relation neither began at birth nor ended with the body's death."
Mrs. Eddy not only saw clearly the light, illuminating glints of which have cheered sincere truth seekers in all ages, but she has demonstrated for this age the practical significance and availability of spiritual truth in the healing of sickness, the casting out of sin, and in this her service to humanity and her place in history are entirely unique.
