Page:The Mental Cure.djvu/7



design of the following treatise is to explain the nature and laws of the inner life of man, and to contribute some light on the subject of Mental Hygiene, which is beginning to assume importance in the treatment of disease, and to attract the attention of physiologists. We have aimed to illustrate the correspondence of the soul and body, their mutual action and reaction, and to demonstrate the causal relation of disordered mental states to diseased physiological action, and the importance and mode of regulating the intellectual and affectional nature of the invalid under any system of medical treatment. We have also endeavoured to demonstrate the value, as remedial agencies, of those subtle forces, both material and spiritual, which the improved science of the age is beginning to recognise, and to explain the laws of our interior being which render the so-called magnetic treatment so efficient in the cure of diseased conditions of the organism, and which bids fair to supplant the current and longer established therapeutic systems. We have pointed out the laws that govern the action of mind upon mind, and the transmission of vital force from one person to another, and the potent influence of our inward states in the generation of pathological conditions of the body, and in its restoration to health. While it does not profess to be a work on mental philosophy, some discussion of the nature and laws of the mind seemed to be necessary to a proper understanding of the general subject of the volume. We have endeavoured to prove the essential spirituality of human nature