Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/132

94 Such portentous appreciation greatly excited the ambition of Quimby. He desired to measure up to this conception of himself and his work. He would retire to his study after treating to attempt to reduce a history of his cures to a science. He gathered from Mrs. Patterson’s conversation that he should write something, and perhaps with a quite innocent idea of copying a model he asked her to write something out first. For this purpose he gave her some notes he had made, commenting on the symptoms of recent patients. She took these to her boarding-house and occupied several days striving to piece them into an essay.

Her efforts were not a brilliant success. His penciled thoughts continually contradicted themselves and not only themselves, they directly contradicted her conception of her own cure or any other she had known of. When Mrs. Patterson talked with Quimby, he did not contradict her; on the contrary, he quickly adopted both her language and ideas; but such words as science, principle, truth, inserted at random in his subsequent notes, found no place in his jumble of theories and produced an extraordinary result. As an example of this result, the following quotation is said to be from Quimby’s pencil:

I will now try to establish this science or rock, and upon it I will build the science of life. My foundation is animal matter or life. This set in action by wisdom produces thought. Thoughts, like grains of sand, are held together by their own sympathy, wisdom or attraction. Now man is composed of these particles of matter, or thought,