Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/110

90 A change of belief changes all the physical symptoms,

and determines a case for better or worse, Nerves carry a changed report over the body, according to the changed belief.

Destruction of the auditory nerve and paralysis of the optic nerve are not needed to ensure deafness and blindness; for if mortal mind says, “I am deaf and blind,” it will be so without an injured nerve. Every theory opposed to this fact (as I learned in metaphysics) would make man, who is immortal in spiritual understanding, a mortal in material belief.

The authentic history of Kaspar Hauser is a useful hint as to the frailty and inadequacy of mortal mind.

It proves, beyond a doubt, that education constitutes this so-called mind; and that, in turn, mortal mind avenges itself on the body, by the false sense it imparts. Incarcerated in a dungeon, where neither sight nor sound could reach him, at the age of seventeen Kaspar was still a mental infant, crying and chattering with no more intelligence than a babe, and realizing Tennyson's description:

His case proves material sense to be but a belief formed by education alone. The light which affords us joy gave him a belief of intense pain. His eyes were inflamed by the light. To his belief it gave suffering instead of joy. After the babbling boy was taught to speak a few words, he asked to be taken back to his dungeon, and said that he should never be happy anywhere else. Outside of dismal darkness and cold silence