Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/362

350 The leading arguments to be used in curing insanity are the same as in other diseases: namely, the impossibility for matter to control Mind, or to suffer; the need that mortal mind be healed by Truth; that Mind can establish a healthy brain; that Intelligence can destroy all error, whether that error be called physical or mental, dementia or dysentery.

There are many species of insanity. Sin is a high degree of insanity. It is only spared from this classification because its method of madness is more in consonance with common mortal belief. Every sort of sickness is a degree of insanity; that is, sickness is always hallucination. This view is not altered by the fact that it is not acknowledged or discovered by everybody.

There is a universal insanity, that mistakes fable for fact throughout the entire round of the material senses; but this general craze cannot shield the individual case from the special name of insanity. Those unfortunate people, who are committed to insane asylums, are but well-defined instances of the baneful effects of illusion on mortal minds and bodies.

We can never treat both mind and matter, for there is but one existence, and that one is immortal Mind. The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a mild species of insanity. Do drugs go of their own accord to the brain, and so destroy the inflammation of its disordered functions, — thus reaching mortal mind through matter? Or does this mind first distribute the drugs through the blood, and thence to intelligence and sentiment?

The only effect produced by medicine is dependent