Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/434

422 pleasure in sin, — that you can find it in drunkenness, stealing, lying, fraud, defamation. The grand truths of Science dispute this error.

Will-power is but an illusion of belief, and this illusion commits depredations on harmony. Human will is an animal propensity, not a faculty of Soul. Hence it cannot govern man aright. Science reveals Truth and Love as the motive-powers of man. Will — blind, stubborn and headlong — co-operates with appetite and passion. Thence arises its evil. Thence also comes its powerlessness, since power belongs to good, not to evil.

The Science of Mind needs to be understood. Until it is understood, mortals are more or less deprived of Truth. Human theories are helpless to make man harmonious or immortal, since he is so already, according to Science. Our only need is to find this out, and reduce to practice the Principle of perfect manhood.

“Quench not the Spirit, despise not prophecy.” Human belief — or knowledge gained from the so-called material senses — would, by fair logic, annihilate man, along with the dissolving elements of clay. The scientific explanations of the nature and origin of man destroy all material sense with immortal testimony. This gives place to the spiritual sense of man, which can be obtained from no other source.

Sleep and mesmerism explain the mythical nature of material sense. Sleep reveals material sense as either oblivion or nothingness, as illusion or dream.

Under the mesmeric illusion of belief, a man will think that he is freezing when he is warm, and swimming when he is on dry land. Needle-thrusts will not hurt him; a delicious perfume will seem intolerable.