Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/422

418 opinion. To put man's wisdom into it is to make the disease larger than the real man.

It is a common remark that after we shake off this mortal coil the spirit will be set free. This is to acknowledge that the body is larger than the spirit or wisdom. No wonder with such a belief men pray to be delivered from the body of sin and death.

Thanks to this wisdom I, my wisdom, can see myself outside this earthly belief and afloat in the ocean of space, where opinions are like stones and pebbles that men throw at each other, while to me they have no weight at all. All these are in me, that is, in my wisdom, and not wisdom in them. I stand in my wisdom to the sick who are in their opinions trying to get me out, and the harder they try the deeper they go into the mire. So Wisdom pleads their case, and if I get their case then opinion is destroyed and health resumes its sway. If you understand this you can cure.

All that is seen by the natural man is mind reduced to a state called matter.

Man's happiness is in knowing that he is no part of what can be seen by the eye of opinion.

This world is the shadow of Wisdom's amusements.

It is noticeable that Dr. Quimby holds very steadily to a few great ideas, those that yield a vision of the spiritual life in contrast with worldly matters. Thus we find him contrasting Science with opinion, the spiritual with the natural man, and the spiritual senses with bodily sensibility. He dwells without limit upon the superstitions to which the race has been subjected by priests and the bondages which are traceable to medical opinion. With endless repetition he classifies disease as an “error of mind” or “invention of man,” showing how sensations or pains of minor import have been misinterpreted so as to generate such maladies as cancer and consumption. He is always tracing a patient's trouble to the particular beliefs, religious, social, medical, which have been accepted in place of realities. Thus his main interest seems to be to disclose the power of adverse suggestion, fear, error, ill-founded belief. His thought therefore seems to lack scope. He seldom takes his readers into the larger world of social problems. He draws few illustrations from history. Even when describing the inner life he passes by such