setting of the sun. The brain has no more feeling than the hair, a truth which physiology admits. Dr. Carpenter's affirmation amounts to saying that a feeling exists in what has no feeling. The sensorium, or seat of sensation, is not in the body at all, or in any part of it. It is a principle of the transcendental philosophy that time and space are not external entities, but exist in us as modes of thought, time being the succession of ideas in the mind, and space the distinguishing of things, or the viewing of them as distinct rather than all at once. But as both time and space are in us as modes of thought, it follows that we locate a pain by thought and in thought. But we have the same power to deny its existence in any particular part of the body, or to locate it outside of the body, that we have to think at all. The phenomenon of misplaced sensation is one familiar to physicians and physiologists. Where we think a pain to be, there it is to us, for it exists only in thought. To put it out of thought is to annihilate it. The same is true of disease in the proper sense of the word. By thought and in thought we give it locality. But if it is not in the body, which is intuitively true, and not in the spirit, which is the real self, then where is it, you will ask? It exists in the animal soul as a false way of thinking. It may come to us from the general current of the world's life, an established wrong belief in the collective soul from which we are not disconnected. It is the office of faith to correct this established "public opinion," and lift us out of its disordered current. Faith disowns the disease or discomfort as belonging to the non-ego, or the "not me," and by doing this we free ourselves from it and relegate it to its source.

With regard to other diseases, we may affirm that paralysis is not in the body. It is a loss of desire and will, which are the spiritual principle of motion. Nervous diseases, as they are popularly called, are not in the nerves. This popular

notion or current opinion which is encouraged by the learned ignorance of the various schools of medicine is only superficial nonsense. The nerves are innocent of any fault. General debility is not a physical condition. Weakness and strength cannot in strict propriety be predicated of the bodily organism, as the five hundred muscles are not a force any more than an engine is a force. In the latter the expansive power of steam is the energy that moves the powerless machinery, and even this has its seat in the universal worldsoul or life-principle. General debility, for which we give Peruvian bark and iron, is a mental languor. Every one knows how a little pleasurable mental excitement increases the strength and invigorates the whole muscular system. Nausea is not in the membranes of the stomach, but is either a conscious or unconscious feeling of repugnance and antipathy in the soul. The very thought of a disgusting object causes us to express it by a movement as if we were about to vomit. Is it then the object or the thought of it that makes us sick? But you will ask, "Is poison in the material substance or is it in us?" If I affirm it is not necessarily in the drug, you will kindly ask me to swallow stricnia or Prussic acid. You will excuse me if I answer you in the language of another under analogous circumstances: "Get thee behind me, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." The truth seems to be that in the spiritual or immaterial essence of Prussic acid there is something antagonistic to the life-principle in us. It is certainly given in medicine in small quantities, so that below a certain amount it is not considered deleterious, but useful. Then it is not the thing itself that kills, but the quantity. What we affirm, and which is the only practical principle in relation to the subject is, that having swallowed it accidentally, so that we have not by our presumption "tempted the Lord our God," there is a power in a true faith (if we have it or can

get it) that will save us from its effects. The lower law of its deadly influence will be suspended by the action of the higher law of faith. For this we have the authority of Jesus the Christ. (Mark xvi: 17, 18.) If a person swallows only a small amount of stricnia, but under the impression that it is a large quantity, it will intensify its effects. If, on the other hand, we swallow an overdose, but believing and thinking it only a small quantity, it will mitigate its influence. If our mode of thinking in regard to it thus affects its action, why is it unreasonable that faith may wholly repeal the natural law of its action? And if it is thus an antidote to poison, and annuls the law of its action, why may it not cure all diseases that are curable? Perhaps our best remedy is found in the simple prayer, "Lord, increase our faith."

We might continue this discussion in regard to the mental aspect of disease, and the common illusions respecting it, and affirm that dyspepsia is not a condition of the stomach, and so on through the whole catalogue of ills that flesh is supposed to be heir to. But enough has been said to illustrate a general principle. The whole practice of materialistic medication will seem to the spiritual man as absurd as it would be to take the invalid and place him in the sunlight, aud then apply the remedies to the shadow of the man rather than to the man himself. In the system of Jesus, the body was healed by saving and restoring the soul. So, in the employment of spiritual forces and metaphysical agencies in the cure of an invalid, we ignore the body so far as to view it only as the umbra of the real man, and direct our attention to the morbid idea, the mental image of the disease in the mind of the patient. The importance of this procedure we shall endeavor to show in our next lesson. We do this on the self-evident principle that an effect will disappear on the removal of its cause, as an effect exists in its cause, and is one with it. They must both stand or fall together. We

act also on the principle laid down by Jesus, that "it is the spirit that maketh alive; the flesh profiteth nothing." (John vi: 63.) To direct our attention, as is usually done, to the body only, is to aim away from the central mark, and of necessity to miss it.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DEEPEST REALITY OF DISEASE IS A MORBID IDEA AND BELIEF.

IDEAS, as we have before shown, are conceptions, or the union of thought and feeling on the intermediate plane of our being. By a morbid idea we mean a false or erroneous intellectual way of thinking, which, if it becomes a fixed mode of thought, is united to the correlative feeling. This is the inner history of the genesis of all disease. Every material thing in the universe, including the so-called physical diseases, exists in us as an idea, without which it has and can have no existence for us. For the idea of a thing and the thing itself, are not two separate and distinct entities, capable of an existence independent of each other, but together they constitute an inseparable and indivisible unity. Remove the idea of a thing, as of a chair, a table, or a coin, or of a so-called bodily malady, as is frequently done in the magnetic state, and from a law of necessity, the thing or object disappears. The substance being removed, the phenomenon, the appearance, the shadow, goes with it. The properties or sensible qualities of all the objects of nature, as Berkeley unanswerably demonstrated, cannot exist independent of or outside of a percipient mind. They exist in our minds as thoughts and ideas, and as a feeling which we denominate a sensation. If we remove from our minds, or from the mind of a patient, the mental image or idea of the malady, the disease will vanish as certainly as to remove an object from before a mirror will cause the disappearance of its reflected image. In proportion as the idea and the belief