Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/48

36 terrible in strength and control, was an unconscious error in the beginning, — an embryotic thought, without motive, — that afterwards governed the so-called man. Passion, appetite, dishonesty, envy, and malice ripen into action, to pass on from shame and woe to their next stage, self-destruction.

When darkness comes over the earth the senses have no evidence of a sun. The human mind knows not where the orb of day is, or if it exists. Astronomy, the interpreter of the solar system, decides that question. The human senses yield to this opposite evidence, willing to leave with astronomy the explanation of the sun and its influence on the earth. If the personal senses see no sun for a week, we still believe there is solar light and heat.

Science, so far, has beaten illusion out of its crude theory, and established its own theory. Mortals should no more deny the effect of mortal mind on the body, when the cause is not seen, — and when the belief producing the effect is unconscious of its effects, — than it should deny the sunlight when the orb disappears.

The valves of the heart, opening and closing on the blood, obey the mandate of mortal mind, as directly as does the hand moved by the will; though anatomy admits the mental cause of the latter action, but not of the former.

Mortal mind is ignorant of self, or it could never be self-deceived. If it knew how to be better, it would be better. The inanimate, unconscious substratum of the human mind, that we call the body, is the seedling that starts thought, and sends it to the brain for consciousness.