Page:Valid Objections to So-called Christian Science (1902).pdf/30

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stimulate the mind. Nor will he perceive that disease and pain may proceed from external material causes over which the mind does not, and cannot possibly have, any appreciable control.

He is like a person who would weigh all the water in the world, and because there is so much of it would assume that there cannot possibly be any land. He has apprehended in a dim way a certain part of the truth; but, by assuming that he has apprehended it all, he is led into the gravest and most serious errors. Having attempted to go one step on the road, and assuming that his science is complete, he discards the scientific habit, and hence he finds no further entrance into the realms of knowledge than the distance penetrated in his a priori assumption.

But this assumption is scientifically fallacious, as may be readily seen. To conceive that all perceptions and objective phenomena are the creations and products of mind, is to assume that consciousness and idealization are states existing prior in time to the objective phenomena supposed to surround us. If mind in the world and in the human being is the all, then it must have within it, ready made, the ideal conceptions of each