Page:Science and Health.djvu/344

340 the same reality to discord we do to harmony, one has as high a claim on confidence and obedience as the other. If evil is as real as good, error is as real and immortal as Truth. What we name diseased action is discord, but harmony is the reality of being; hence the former is a belief only, and not the Truth of being; if death is as real as Life, immortality is a myth, and if pain is as real as the absence of pain, it will be immortal, and harmony is not the order of being. Personal sense discords, and is therefore a belief only; matter has no sensation; the action proceeding from Soul is harmonious and eternal.

In Mohammedan belief, a pilgrimage to Mecca was salutary to save man's Soul, and in still another belief, inanimate matter is able to save man; one is paganism, the other materia medica. Disease germinates in unconscious mind, until it reaches what is termed conscious matter, or the body, named personal sense, but there is no conscious matter; therefore disease is mind still, named matter; thus the belief of sickness is developed as a germ, rising above its soil, and we have a crop abundant or scanty, according to the variety and strength of soil, the mind full of materia medica, laws of health, physiology, etc. The diagnosis of disease helps more than most things to cultivate the seeds of disease, causing them to take deeper root in the patient's mind, and to spring up, bearing fruit “after its own kind.” Doctors deport themselves, generally, as if there was no law of mind; at least, they regard not this law, or they would sooner administer poison in matter than mind. They fight disease with matter and admit it with mind, and this makes it a certain thing.