Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/178

170 Neoplatonists as to the knowledge of intellect. Mrs. Eddy says: “How are veritable ideas to be distinguished from illusions? By learning the origin of each. Ideas are emanations from the divine Mind. Thoughts proceeding from the brain or from matter are offshoots of mortal mind.” Referring to Webster she defines idea as “the immediate object of understanding.” This definition is Platonic. Its terms differentiate it sharply from an empirical definition of ideas. Mrs. Eddy, like Spinoza, distinguishes ideas from images. Now Mrs. Eddy considers that ideas constitute all real knowledge. So all true knowledge arises in the mind itself and not by means of anything without.

Plotinus speaking of intellect says: “It likewise does not extend itself to the objects of its perception as if it did not possess them, or as if it acquired them externally, or obtained them by a discursive process, as if they were not already present with it;” “If such an intellect, however, has not an adventitious intellection, whatever it intellectually perceives, it perceives from itself.” Spinoza defines an idea as a “mental conception which is formed by the mind as a thinking thing,” and explains that he uses the word “conception” rather than “perception” because the former expresses better the activity of the mind. Spinoza, like Mrs. Eddy, contends that “body cannot determine mind to think.”