Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/424

408 Every sort of sickness is error, — that is, sickness is loss of harmony. This view is not altered by the fact that sin is worse than sickness, and sickness is not acknowledged nor discovered to be error by many who are sick.

There is a universal insanity of so-called health, which mistakes fable for fact throughout the entire round of the material senses, but this general craze cannot, in a scientific diagnosis, shield the individual case from the special name of insanity. Those unfortunate people who are committed to insane asylums are only so many distinctly defined instances of the baneful effects of illusion on mortal minds and bodies.

The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a mild species of

insanity. Can drugs go of their own accord to the brain and destroy the so-called inflammation of disordered functions, thus reaching mortal mind through matter? Drugs do not affect a corpse, and Truth does not distribute drugs through the blood, and from them derive a supposed effect on intelligence and sentiment. A dislocation of the tarsal joint would produce insanity as perceptibly as would congestion of the brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks that the tarsal joint is less intimately connected with the mind than is the brain. Reverse the belief, and the results would be perceptibly different.

The unconscious thought in the corporeal substratum of brain produces no effect, and that condition of

the body which we call sensation in matter is unreal. Mortal mind is ignorant of itself, — ignorant of the errors it includes and of their