Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/241

Rh by so entranced that he forgets that he is something different from it. His soul flows as it were into union with it. The seeing agent and the seen object blend into one. This is the highest blessedness said Plotinus sixteen centuries before Mrs. Eddy began to think his thoughts after him.

Proclus reaffirms the doctrine.

Spinoza also, as we are prepared to believe, repeats it. He says that the true good, or perfect character, consists in “the knowledge of the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature.” The “whole of nature” is a synonym with him, as we have seen, for God. So he thinks that the greatest good consists in one's knowing that he and God, the image and the form that it reflects, are one. Spinoza served as a good medium for the passage of Neoplantonism to Mrs. Eddy. Now, when we remember that he identifies love with the understanding, this language also becomes intelligible: “The intellectual love of the mind towards God is that very love of God whereby God loves himself” and “the love of God towards men and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are identical.”

The doctrine we have been considering is the so-called “deification of man.” It is that the aim of existence and its highest happiness