Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/188

180 of a cause.” Now when this simple idea is the idea of God who is the cause of all things, conceived under the “form of eternity,” we have what the “ancients” called “knowledge according to the one” or knowledge of an effect through its cause, and this Spinoza considered to be the highest kind of knowledge, intuitive consciousness, or the knowledge of infinite intellect only. It is much like what Kant calls a priori knowledge.

For Mrs. Eddy to repeat this curious and most subtle speculation of the “ancients” is a very incriminating fact.

At this point the students' attention is called to the primary importance of the above psychological positions. I hope he will see that they are fundamental to much that has been said as to the nature of God, the nature of the world and the nature of man. One's psychology is basic in his system, especially when it is idealism. The logical consistency of both Spinoza and Mrs. Eddy in applying Neoplatonic psychology to Christ has striking significence and peculiarly argumentative force in establishing this thesis. This completes what we have to say on the first phase of the subject of psychology.

We are now to take up certain specific mental activities which Mrs. Eddy classifies as inferior knowledge. Her treatment of them is Neoplatonic. Let us not forget that this kind of knowledge, if in truth according to Mrs. Eddy it