Page:Science and Health.djvu/93

Rh contributes to the general welfare. Principle demands to be understood; but phenomena not based on Principle, you can explain falsely, insomuch as they are creations of sense instead of Soul.

When sensation proceeds from Soul instead of body, the impressions are lucid and pure, and the intuitions correct and harmonious. But when mortal mind, or belief produces them, discord, disease, sin and death are the result. Mesmerism is error that leaves man at the mercy of matter, will, caprice, and mortal mind; God, Spirit, never mesmerized man or matter. The simplest object in the hand of a mesmerized subject may shock him with a belief of danger; a napkin becomes to him a serpent that stings him; and this is the sensation that is belief. Place in his hand a cold apple; create the belief it is hot, and it produces at once the sensation of pain, the same as fire; destroy this belief of a burn, and the pain disappears. Is not this proof that pain is a belief? Again, whatever object the mesmerizer presents mentally to his subject, he sees; do not these facts prove the so-called senses of the body, mind, instead of organs and nerves? But mesmerism should be put under bonds not to do evil; at any estimate it is a shameful waste of reason and honesty. That pain and pleasure are produced by belief, in the absence of all conditions to occasion them, is another proof that sensation is mind and not matter. To admit mind sees, hears, feels, etc., without the agency of matter, is a step toward science.

In genuine clairvoyance there is no sensation in the body during its continuance. But to see in belief is not to see in reality; the basis of the science of being