Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/197

Rh not see it. What is the use to prove anything to the “physical senses” when their testimony is “false testimony” and must be reversed?

However we are not concerned primarily with the absurdities of the positions of Christian Science but with the fact that it reproduces the principles of Neoplatonism. When Mrs. Eddy follows the Neoplatonists in psychology without their metaphysics, her slavery to them becomes the more palpable.

Plotinus says: “Sense, and not intellect, will have an apprehension of things external; and if you are willing to grant it, this will also be the case with the dianoetic power and opinion.” The “dianoetic power” means reasoning faculty. Proclus says: “Of the whole rational soul, one part is intellect, another is dianoia (discursive reason), and a third is opinion;” “Dianoia is the knowledge of things which subsist between intelligibles and the objects of opinion.”

Spinoza, as usual, follows Plotinus and Proclus. Consider carefully his analysis of knowledge found in his Ethics and these statements: “The nature and efficacy of the natural reason consists in deducing and proving the unknown from the known;” which he holds to be “perception arising when the essence of one thing is