An endeavor to present in a popular way the philosophy and practice of mental healing.
The author does not claim for her essay either completeness or permanent value, but hopes “to fix a few points and establish a few relative values, in anticipation of the time when human research and experience shall complete the pictures.”
She holds that the human mind can achieve nothing that is so good except when it becomes the channel of the infinite spirit of God, and that so-called mind cures are not brought about wholly by the power of the mind over the body, or by the influence of one mind over another.
Religious enthusiasm and scientific medicine abound in cases of extraordinary cures of diseases effected by what, for the sake of convenience, is generally called “faith.”
It will not do, says the British Medical Journal, for pathologists and psychologists to treat these “modern miracles” so cavalierly.
In them are exhibited, in a more or less legitimate manner, the results of the action of the mind upon the bodily functions and particles.
Hysteria is curable by these phenomena, since hysteria, after all, is only an unhealthy mastery of the body over the mind, and is cured by this or any other stimulus to the imagination. “Therefore,” says the editor of the above journal, “there is no reason to doubt that faith-healing, so called, may have more positive results than we have been accustomed to allow.”
* * * * *
TYPICAL NEW ENGLAND ELMS AND OTHER TREES. Reproduced by Photogravure from photographs by Henry Brooks, with an Introduction, and with Notes by L. L. Dame. 4to. [In press.
* * * * *