Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/171

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THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE.
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ence is better understood, this matter will become clearer; and we may hope that a "science of medicine" will take the place of empiricism. In the meantime the suggestion may stand as an attempted explanation of the fact that "Divine Providence concurs" with the use of herbs and simples to the cure of man's immediate distresses.

And what of mental states, imagination, hope, expectation, faith, and the direct production of such states by the influence of mind upon mind, which has been the physician's stronghold in all time, and in all schools of practice? "The Doctor's highest power is personal, social, magnetic, spiritual, not medicinal." Are there possibilities of useful development in this power? Dr. Holcombe defines three forms of this influence.

"It is Mind-Cure when one person of strong will and magnetic power, operates by thought-transference from a positive standpoint, upon the mind and nervous system of a patient made negative by sickness, fear, ignorance or debility. By a species of mental induction, he produces a new state of thought, which through the correlation of the nervons system brings about a condition of health. It is a species of mesmerism."—Page 43.

This is what we are all the time doing, one for another, or one against the other,—namely, producing "by a species of mental induction a new state of thought," thus call-