But the foundress was not content with the rôle of giving forth such insight as she may have had as a Seer. She tries to explain it, and the consequence is such a tangle of incoherent, inconsistent, confused statements, contradictory to each other, as has, perhaps, never seriously been given to the world before. And where, occasionally, the statements, at least as to their wording, are clear and unmistakable in their meaning, so far from clearing away the difficulties of Idealism, they add much to the obscurity, and leave the subject in a position likely to act in the long run in favour of Materialism rather than in the direction intended.
We will take an instance. Mrs. Eddy lays great stress on the Oneness of the Universe. Here we shall few of us quarrel with her, for Unity is the root-idea of Thought, whether scientific or philosophic, or even that of mere common-sense, since it is only by Unity that one thing can be seen in relation to another. The Unity is, however, difficult of apprehension, since it is essentially an idea—although none the less real for that—being, from the physical point of view, never seen or apprehended as a material thing. Therefore it is non-material, something spiritual or mental to be realised by insight other than that of the senses. Mrs. Eddy has this insight, and has it very strongly.
Idealism, however, is no sooner arrived at than it presents us with a very hard knot to untie, and it is here that we shall see how far Mrs. Eddy can give us any adequate metaphysical solution.
She realises, like much greater thinkers, how hard it is to understand how our material world can be contained in a spiritual idea, and that Matter and Mind are of difficult reconciliation, although, if we grant they both exist, they are so obviously related that they must be reconcilable within a Unity somehow. This reconciliation has cost much thought for thousands of years on the part of the deepest thinkers, but the easy way of solving the difficulty in the case of shallow thinkers is to do it by throwing one or other of the members in this pair of opposites away, to deny it existence, and so to attain a cheap conception of unity by pronouncing either matter or mind to be a mere illusion. The Materialist tries cancelling Mind. Mrs. Eddy throws out Matter and with it our entire physical world, not only the objects in it, but all mental conceptions in regard to it, such as the Laws of Nature, and all possible theories as to its being a manifestation of Mind. All our conceptions of its laws are errors conceived by the intellect, she teaches,[115] which is itself non-existent. In fact, the world only is because we falsely think it is. We have only to unthink it, and it will disappear. Spirit is One, and therefore the many objects of the world cannot be included in it; and only Spirit is real, therefore the material world cannot be real. Such is her argument, and she cannot allow that Matter may be a manifestation of Mind or created by Mind, or have any relation with it of whatever sort. ‘Spirit and Matter no more commingle,’ she says, ‘than light or darkness,’ and she asserts that ‘Science reveals nothing in Spirit out of which to create Matter.’
We have here attained, if we have attained it, Oneness at the expense of the Many. It is One simply by means of containing nothing, and, in place of the inspiring conception of the true thinker of the Unity as One because it includes the Many harmoniously related within itself—a Unity of infinite richness and fecundity—we have a dead, empty One, misnamed Unity because there is nothing to unite. The worship of such a Oneness, it has well been said, would be the worship of the None. Such an One would be all-exclusive instead of all-inclusive, and be gained by the annihilation of everything, instead of by the inclusion of all within Itself as the vital expression of Itself.
In yet another way Mrs. Eddy’s statements concerning Unity contradict themselves. We have seen that in her conception of Unity the whole world, as we know it, has to be evaporated, as it were, into nothingness, and it has been roundly denied that Spirit had anything to do with its creation. Yet the world has to be accounted for, and in the sequel we find that, according to ‘Science and Health,’ it has been created—but by whom or what?
It has been created by the mind of Man, by his thinking power, but not, as we shall find if we read the book carefully, by that part of man’s mind that is real, but by that part of it which is constantly asserted to be unreal, to be, in fact, as much nothing as the world itself is nothing. This part of Man, which is over and over again affirmed to be nothing, is the Mortal Mind, and is endowed with the most tremendous creative powers; for by its thought, its false thought, which is again nothing, it has created for itself a world of objects, and objects connected with each other, not in a state of chaos, as one would expect in a world created by false thought, but objects connected with each other in a marvellously ordered sequence, obeying exact laws with the utmost obedience—laws so elaborate and complex in their results that it has taken Man ages to understand them even a little (although in Mrs. Eddy’s view his own creation), and yet, in their ordered complexity, so simple that they are reducible to a few heads. Such is the wonderful world created by the Mortal Mind, and with which God, as All-in-All, has nothing to do! Thus we have two Creators, two unrelated worlds, and we are landed in a Duality which is absolutely opposed to, and inconsistent with, the Oneness on which Mrs. Eddy lays so much emphasis, and which consequently disappears.
All the rest of Mrs. Eddy’s so-called metaphysical ideas, her teaching on Reality, on the nature of Man, on what constitutes truth and what error, and so on, are equally contradictory, and we are driven to the conclusion that such a hopeless confusion of contradictions is scarcely worthy of the name of Metaphysics or of serious discussion.
We welcome, as we have said, so emphatic an announcement of Idealism, and of the truth of the supremacy of Spirit, but must deeply regret that the Idealism is of so poor and thin a character, and the idea of Spirit and of the Eternal Unity so deplorably impoverished. For, indeed, thus presented, they could not long hold their own, and would soon give place again to the darkness of Materialism.
However, rather than criticise, let us welcome the recall to Idealism, to the recognition of Spirit as the supreme reality in which all physical laws find their truth, and, by a careful study and meditation upon the length and breadth and depth of these great ideas, as set forth in Christianity and all that led up to it, endeavour to do our little part towards a better understanding of these things, and thus in practice we shall indeed find that many a seeming solid barrier can be overleapt, the crooked made straight and rough places plain.