If the patient has pinned his faith to the curative value of mind alone, the mind is for the time being engaged with idea that mind is performing the cure. This is a delusion quite similar to the previous one, in which medicines are taken, with only this difference, that while you pin your faith on drugs in the one case, you pin it to mind cure in the other.
CHAPTER III.
WHAT IS MIND CURE?
This subject has given rise to an endless variety of contradictory discussions, and while it has won for itself fanatical devotees on one side, it has been ridiculed on the other. This is not at all surprising, when an inquiry is made into the competency of the parties to the controversy. To be informed in metaphysical philosophy, or fully equipped in scriptural lore, but without a practical study in the art and theory of medical science, precludes the possibility of presenting the theme in a logical manner, or establishing a relevancy between medical science and mind cure. A medical education that is based on strictly physical characteristics of disease, as they are studied at the bedside, or in a microscopical laboratory, is equally inadequate; for the question of mind cure goes beyond the physical into the metaphysical, and not until the operations of the mind have been closely followed to the bodily or organic functions, can the intimacy of their relations be thoroughly appreciated. Medical men betray their incapacity for observation if they contemptuously dismiss the subject of mind cure by some superficial, disparaging illustration, for there is much more in the subject than is dreamt of, even in the mind of the average college professor.
“The mind,” says Dr. W. F. Evans, “can be made the plastic or formative principle of the body, and that thought can retard, pervert, or stimulate and correct the different functions of the human organism.” The relation of spirit and matter is very intimate, and some very clever thinkers resolve all matter into spirit, in its ultimate analysis.
Bishop Berkeley affirms this in his “Principles of Human Knowledge.” In section seven he says “there is not any other substance than spirit.”
If we view nature from a materialistic standpoint, we see only one-half of what we think we do, and even that must be very imperfectly judged by our senses. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling states the relation of matter and spirit, in very simple and plain words, so that a child can understand what he says: “Nature is spirit visible, and spirit, is invisible nature.” This may be illustrated in physical science from what chemistry teaches of the physical properties of the diamond, whose atoms or molecules are so perfectly continuous and closely aggregated that it forms one of the hardest substances known to physicists. These atoms of pure carbon may be made to repel each other, so that the diamond assumes a gaseous state, which is imperceptible to our senses.