Page:Science and Health.djvu/416

Rh. There is no pain without mind; matter cannot suffer or produce suffering. Disease is a fear expressed physically, not by the lips, but the functions of the body. Mitigate the fear, and you relieve the affected organ; destroy it, and the body regains its healthy functions. However impossible this may appear to our educated views on this subject, it is, nevertheless, a fact in science that we have tested sufficiently to declare it, as unhesitatingly as any other demonstrable Truth. That man is unconscious of his fear, neither changes its effects on the body nor the mental fact; ignorance of the cause, or approach of disease, not in the least militates against its mental origin. More or less fear accompanies all ignorance; who that understands the power of mind over body, its impelling force, and how controlled, and this very ignorance, like walking in darkness on the edge of a precipice, is an ever-present involuntary fear.

We say, my body suffers, and mind has nothing to do with it; this is simply impossible. The martyr, burning at the stake, conquers his body with mind, and silences personal sense with Soul. So the opposite extreme of stolidity meets his punishment with less torture than a mind touched to finer issues. Death has occurred from imaginary phlebotomy; individuals have died of contagions, hydrophobia, etc., believing they had been exposed to them, when such was not the case. Many instances of the mind's control over body, producing death, prove this control absolute, instead of partial. Physicians are ready to admit mind affects the body somewhat; but this is but a small part of the fact; science reveals all action produced and controlled by