This page has been validated.
408
SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

kill him, but not otherwise. Mind produces all effects on the body; personal sense has neither pleasure nor pain except to belief, which is all there is to it. A mental image of disease, fully formed, is already painted on the body, whereas another picture of mind we transfer to canvas; 't is the patient's fear that draws the picture, and the artist, mind, executes it fully on the body, but the patient is ignorant of his fear, or what mind's images are, until they are drawn on the body. If no mental image of disease was formed, there could be no manifestation of disease. The belief that disease is a power or Intelligence superior to man, is ever ready to reproduce some image of disease before the mind, and this image causes the fear, and the fear quickens or retards action, producing inflammation or whatever the nature or type of disease that prevails in the general thought, and comes to you entirely unbidden, and with no particular association to call it up. Again, disease comes through association, even as thoughts appear. For instance, your mental condition is a fixed belief, that, exposed to severe cold or dampness, you take cold; hence, the circumstance being this, you suffer the effects of a belief through association. If fevers are abroad, you say, I am liable to have them; and this mental condition, through association, produces the result.

Disease comes after the manner that one thought calls up another. If her child is exposed to conditions deemed dangerous, the mother says, my child will be sick, and her belief reaches her offspring to this very end; but she calls it the circumstances. You say, I have eaten too much, and shall find it difficult to di-