Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/138

130 In this explanation we have a faint reproduction of Hegel. Students of Hegel may recall how much of his philosophy is suggested by three words, thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Thesis stands for absolute existence or God; antithesis for his creation, as ideas coming to self-consciousness or to that stage of development in which they affirm their own existence in opposition or contrast to that of the absolute. The so-called fall of Adam and Eve as related in Genesis is a picture of the rise of this self-consciousness or the knowledge that we have existence as in opposition to God. Of course in this we have an explanation of the fall that explains it away. It becomes rather one stage in the evolution of the race and the universe. It was not a “fall down” but a “fall up” as Henry Ward Beecher eloquently and heretically preached. Mrs. Eddy too, strange to say, finds in the first sins of the race ground for optimism. They become a “cleansing upheaval.” How darkness can help on the cause of light is difficult to see. This trio of brilliants cannot succeed in getting it into our heads that going down is going up.

The third word, synthesis, Hegel used to symbolize thought as realizing the oneness of all things. It stands for the unity of both thesis and antithesis. Now this is the Hegelian trinity which is also Neoplatonic, as will be seen.