It would be a profitless task to review the alleged data of Astrology or Phrenology or Palmistry, except for the illustrations which they readily yield of the nature of the conceptions and of the logic which command a certain popular interest and acceptance. The interest in these notions is, as Mr. Lang argues about ghosts and rappings and bogles, in how they come to be believed, rather than in how much or how little they chance to be true. It must be remembered also that our present interest is in the occult factors of these composite systems; they each contain other factors,—in part incorporations of vague and distorted scientific truths, in part dogmatic overstatement of results of observation, which, if reduced to the proportions warranted by definite evidence, dissolve into insignificance or intangibility, in part plausible or specious argumentation, and in still greater part mere fanciful assertion. And if we proceed to examine the professed evidence for the facts and laws and principles (sit venia verbis) that pervade Astrology or Phrenology or Palmistry or dream-interpretation, or beliefs of that ilk, we find the flimsiest kind of texture, that will hardly bear examination, and holds together only so long as it is kept secluded from the light of day. Far-fetched analogy, baseless assertion, the uncritical assimilation of popular superstitions, a great deal of prophecy after the event (it is wonderful how clearly the astrologer finds the indications of Napoleon's career in his horoscope, or the phrenologist reads them in the Napoleonic cranial protuberances), much fanciful elaboration of detail, ringing the variations on a sufficiently complex and non-demonstrable proposition, cultivating a convenient vagueness of expression, together with an apologetic skill in providing for and explaining exceptions, the courage to ignore failure and the shrewdness to profit by coincidences and half-assimilated smatterings of science, and with it all an insensibility to the moral and intellectual demands of the logical decalogue,—and you have the skeleton, which, clothed with one flesh, becomes Astrology, and with another Phrenology, and with another Palmistry or Solar Biology or Descriptive Mentality or what not. Such pseudo-sciences thrive upon that widespread and intense craving for practical guidance of our individual affairs, which is not satisfied with judicious applications of general principles, with due consideration of the probabilities and uncertainties of human life, but demands an impossible and precise revelation. Not all that passes for, and in a way is knowledge, is or is likely soon to become scientific; and when a peasant parades in an academic gown the result is likely to be a caricature.
VII
To achieve fortune, to judge well and command one's fellow-men, to foretell and control the future, to be wise in worldly lore, are natural objects of human desire; but still another is essential to happiness. Whether we attempt to procure these good fortunes by going early to bed and early to rise, or by more occult procedures, we wish to be healthy as well as wealthy and wise. The maintenance of health and the perpetuity of youth were not absent from the mediæval occultist's search, and formed an essential part of the benefits to be conferred by the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. A series of superstitions and extravagant systems are conspicuous in the antecedents and the by-paths of the history of medicine, and are related to it much as astrology is to astronomy, or alchemy to chemistry; and because medicine in part remains and to previous generations was conspicuously an empirical art rather than a science, it offers great opportunity for practical error and misapplied partial knowledge. It is not necessary to go back to early civilizations or to primitive peoples, among whom the medicine-man and the priest were one and alike appealing to occult powers, nor to early theories of disease which beheld in insanity the obsession of demons and resorted to exorcism to cast them out; it is not necessary to consider the various personages who acquired notoriety as healers by laying on of hands or by appeal to faith, or who, like Mesmer, introduced the system of animal magnetism, or, like some of his followers, sought directions for healing from the clairvoyant dicta of somnambules; it is not necessary to ransack folk-lore superstitions and popular remedies for the treatment of disease; for the modern forms of "irregular" healing offer sufficient illustrations of occult methods of escaping the ills that flesh is heir to.
The existence of a special term for a medical impostor is doubtless the result of the prevalence of the class thus named; but quackery and occult medicine, though mutually overlapping, can by no means be held accountable for one another's failings. Many forms of quackery proceed on the basis of superstitions or fanciful or exaggerated notions containing occult elements, but for the present purpose it is wise to limit attention to those in which this occult factor is distinctive; for medical quackery in its larger relations is neither modern nor occult. Occult healing takes its distinctive character from the theory underlying the practice rather than from the nature of the practice. It is not so much what is done, as why it is done, or pretended to be done or not done, that determines its occult character. A factor of prominence in modern occult healing is indeed one that in other forms characterized many of its predecessors, and was rarely wholly absent from the connection between the procedure and the result; this is the mental factor, which may be called upon to give character to a theory of disease, or be utilized consciously or unconsciously as a curative principle. It is not implied that "mental medicine" is necessarily and intrinsically occult, but only that the general trend of modern occult notions regarding disease may be best portrayed in certain typical forms of "psychic" healing. The legitimate recognition of the importance of mental conditions in health and disease is one of the results of the union of modern psychology and modern medicine. An exaggerated and extravagant as well as pretentious and illogical overstatement and misstatement of this principle may properly be considered as occult.
VIII
Among such systems there is one which by its momentary prominence overshadows all others; and for this reason, as well as for its more explicit or rather more extended statement of principles, must be accorded special attention: I need hardly say that I refer to that egregious misnomer, Christian Science. This system is said to have been discovered by, or revealed to, Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy in 1866. Several of its most distinctive positions (without their religious setting) are to be found in the writings, and were used in the practice of Mr. or Dr. P. P. Quimby (1802-1866), whom Mrs. Eddy professionally consulted shortly before she began her own propagandum. On its theoretical side, the system presents a series of quasi-metaphysical principles and also a professed interpretation of the Scriptures; on its practical side, it offers a means of curing or avoiding disease, and includes under disease also what is more generally described as sin and misfortune. With Christian Science as a religious movement I shall not directly deal; I wish, however, to point out that this assumption of a religious aspect finds a parallel in Spiritualism and Theosophy, and doubtless forms one of the most potent reasons for the success of these occult movements. It would be a most dangerous principle to admit that the treatment of disease and the right to ignore hygiene can become the perquisite of any religious faith. It would be equally unwarranted to permit the principles which are responsible for such beliefs to take shelter behind the ramparts of religious tolerance, for the essential principles of Christian Science do not constitute a form of Christianity any more than they constitute a science; but, in so far as they do not altogether elude description, pertain to the domain over which medicine, physiology, and psychology hold sway. As David Harum, in speaking of his church-going habits, characteristically explains, "the one I stay away from when I don't go 's the Presbyteriun," so the doctrines which Christian Science "stays away from," are those over which recognized departments of academic learning have the authority to decide.
Mrs. Eddy's magnum opus, serving at once as the text-book of the "science" and as a revised version of the Scriptures, "Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures," has been circulated to the extent of one hundred and seventy thousand copies. I shall not give an account of this book, nor subject its more tangible tenets to a logical review; I must be content to recommend its pages as suggestive reading for the student of the modern occult, and to set forth in the credentials of quotation marks some of the dicta concerning disease. Yet it may be due to the author, or mouthpiece, of this system, to begin by citing what are declared to be its fundamental tenets, even if their connection with what is built upon them is far from evident.
"The fundamental propositions of Christian Science are summarized in the four following, to me, self-evident propositions. Even if read backward, these propositions will be found to agree in statement and proof:—
"1. God is All in all.
"2. God is good. Good is Mind.
"3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.
"4. Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease—Disease, sin, evil, death, deny Good, omnipotent God, Life."
"What is termed disease does not exist." "Matter has no being." "All is mind." "Matter is but the subjective state of what is here termed mortal mind." "All disease is the result of education, and can carry its ill effects no farther than mortal mind maps out the way." "The fear of dissevered bodily members, or a belief in such a possibility, is reflected on the body, in the shape of headache, fractured bones, dislocated joints, and so on, as directly as shame is seen rising to the cheek. This human error about physical wounds and colics is part and parcel of the delusion that matter can feel and see, having sensation and substance." "Insanity implies belief in a diseased brain, while physical ailments (so-called) arise from belief that some other portions of the body are deranged.... A bunion would produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the brain, were it not that mortal mind calls the bunion an unconscious portion of the body. Reverse this belief and the results would be different." "We weep because others weep, we yawn because they yawn, and we have small-pox because others have it; but mortal mind, not matter, contains and carries the infection." "A Christian Scientist never gives medicine, never recommends hygiene, never manipulates." "Anatomy, Physiology, Treatises on Health, sustained by what is termed material law, are the husbandmen of sickness and disease." "You can even educate a healthy horse so far in physiology that he will take cold without his blanket." "If exposure to a draught of air while in a state of perspiration is followed by chills, dry cough, influenza, congestive symptoms in the lungs, or hints of inflammatory rheumatism, your Mind-remedy is safe and sure. If you are a Christian Scientist, such symptoms will not follow from the exposure; but if you believe in laws of matter and their fatal effects when transgressed, you are not fit to conduct your own case or to destroy the bad effects of belief. When the fear subsides and the conviction abides that you have broken no law, neither rheumatism, consumption, nor any other disease will ever result from exposure to the weather." "Destroy fear and you end the fever." "To prevent disease or cure it mentally let spirit destroy the dream of sense. If you wish to heal by argument, find the type of the ailment, get its name, and array your mental plea against the physical. Argue with the patient (mentally, not audibly) that he has no disease, and conform the argument to the evidence. Mentally insist that health is the everlasting fact, and sickness the temporal falsity. Then realize the presence of health, and the corporeal senses will respond, so be it." "My publications alone heal more sickness than an unconscientious student can begin to reach." "The quotients, when numbers have been divided by a fixed rule, are not more unquestionable than the scientific tests I have made of the effects of truth upon the sick." "I am never mistaken in my scientific diagnosis of disease." "Outside of Christian Science all is vague and hypothetical, the opposite of Truth." "Outside Christian Science all is error."
Surely this is a remarkable product of mortal mind! It would perhaps be an interesting tour de force, though hardly so entertaining as "Alice in Wonderland," to construct a universe on the assertions and hypotheses which Christian Science presents; but it would have less resemblance to the world we know than has Alice's wonderland. For any person for whom logic and evidence are something more real than ghosts or myths, the feat must always be relegated to the airy realm of the imagination, and must not be brought in contact with earthly realities. And yet the extravagance of Mrs. Eddy's book, its superb disdain of vulgar fact, its transcendental self-confidence, its solemn assumption that reiteration and variation of assertion somehow spontaneously generate proof or self-evidence, its shrewd assimilation of a theological flavor, its occasional successes in producing a presentable travesty of scientific truth,—all these distinctions may be found in many a dust-covered volume, that represents the intensity of conviction of some equally enthusiastic and equally inspired occultist, but one less successful in securing a chorus to echo his refrain.
The temptation is strong not to dismiss "Eddyism" without illustrating the peculiar structures under which, in an effort to be consistent, it is forced to take shelter. Since disease is always of purely mental origin, it follows that disease and its symptoms cannot ensue without the conscious coöperation of the patient; since "Christian Science divests material drugs of their imaginary power," it follows that the labels on the bottles that stand on the druggist's shelves are correspondingly meaningless. And it becomes an interesting problem to inquire how the consensus of mortal mind came about that associates one set of symptoms with prussic acid, and another with alcohol, and another with quinine. Inhaling oxygen or common air would prepare one for the surgeon's knife, and prussic acid or alcohol have no more effect than water, if only a congress of nations were to pronounce the former to be anæsthetic and promulgate a decree that the latter be harmless. Christian Science does not flinch from this position. "If a dose of poison is swallowed through mistake and the patient dies, even though physician and patient are expecting favorable results, does belief, you ask, cause this death? Even so, and as directly as if the poison had been intentionally taken. In such cases a few persons believe the potion swallowed by the patient to be harmless; but the vast majority of mankind, though they know nothing of this particular case and this special person, believe the arsenic, the strychnine, or whatever the drug used, to be poisonous, for it has been set down as a poison by mortal mind. The consequence is that the result is controlled by the majority of opinions outside, not by the infinitesimal minority of opinions in the sick chamber." But why should the opinions of οἱ πολλοί [Greek: hoi polloi] be of influence in such a case, and the enlightened minorities be sufficient to effect the marvelous cures in all the other cases? Christian Scientists do not take cold in draughts in spite of the contrary opinions or illusions of misguided majorities. The logical Christian Scientist concludes that he need not eat, "for the truth is food does not affect the life of man;" and yet at once renounces his faith by adding, "but it would be foolish to venture beyond our present understanding, foolish to stop eating, until we gain more goodness and a clearer comprehension of the living God." And the mental physician, to be consistent, must be a mental surgeon also; and not plead that, "Until the advancing age admits the efficacy and supremacy of mind, it is better to leave the adjustment of broken bones and dislocations to the fingers of surgeons."