silent method in comfort and ease. At a distance it might seem as if the pioneer were lost in the woods of mental influences, not blazing a straight way through. But it is the one who has encountered all the difficulties and found the way through, who knows the sorrow and sufferings because he has borne them in sympathy, who can tell us the whole story. And, plainly, the affirmation or silent realization is only a part of the process as our pioneer developed it stage by stage in his journey. Had that part been sufficient he might have turned more quickly from his mesmeric experiments to the utilization of ideal suggestions as substitutes for medical and priestly opinion, he might have remained on the level of mind-to-mind projection of human thought. But his guidances led him far beyond all this to the conclusion that in taking the sufferings of patients upon himself he was learning the way of the Christ, coming to learn God's presence as love.
There is one further point to note in reading the letters and accounts of the intermediate period, that is, the frequent references to the mind as if it were merely part of the body or identical with the “fluids” of the organism. Dr. Quimby has found that opinions and adverse mental pictures take such hold upon the mind that they produce what we would now call subconscious after-effects. He has found that these disturbing mental states, believed in and increasing in power through fear and other disturbing emotions, bring about changes in the nervous system, in the circulation, and in other ways. But he lacks the common term, subconsciousness, and so is compelled to speak, now as if the mind were constituted of thoughts simply, again as if it were the mere nervous activities and the circulation of the blood. This is why he refers to the mind as “the name of something, and this something is the fluids of the body. Disease is the name of the disturbance of these fluids or mind.” Later we shall see that by the term mind used in this sense Dr. Quimby always means the lower mental processes, never the real self. This is “the mind that can be changed,” the mind that is subject to every wind of doctrine. Dr. Quimby was in possession of the facts we now call “subconscious,” but could not readily name them. Consequently he often uses figurative language, as in his comparison of thought to the blossom of a rose. Again, he speaks of himself
