energy I prefer to call the universal, divine life-principle in nature, the akasa (pronounced ahasa) of the Hindu metaphysics, an all-pervading, omnipresent, vivific principle of life and motion identical in its higher aspects with the Holy Spirit of the Gospels. An act of faith determines a current, so to speak, of this inconceivably subtle life-force toward the result aimed at and desired. Hence through faith, which is but a mode of thought in union with feeling, a disease is curable that otherwise would be incurable.

It is a peculiarity of the Hindu mind that it is transcendental, and gives more reality to the supersensuous, and especially to thought, than is done in our European and American philosophy. The subjective and objective become one. In the Lânka Vâtara, one of the sacred books of Buddhism, it is said: "What seems external exists not at all, only the soul manifests itself in different forms.” Again it is affirmed, "All worlds are but the creation of our thought." This sounds like the words of Fichte in his algebraic formula," the Ego equals the non-Ego," or external things are included in the Ego or inner self. Even Condillac, who reproduced the sensational philosophy of Locke in France, though a materialist, was compelled to say, "Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive." Neither Berkeley, nor Fichte, nor Schopenhauer ever said more than this. The doctrine taught by Buddhism twenty-five centuries ago has come down through Christianity, and is faintly heard as a dying echo in Emerson; so faint that few even hear it at all. He says,

"All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent, and those that are independent of your will." (Nature: Addresses and Lectures, p. 324.)

Our doctrine is nothing new, and need not be startling,

We are intensely conservative, as was Jesus the Christ, who says no man who has drunk old wine, or tasted the ancient spiritual truth, straightway desires the new, for the old is better. This is not common bar-room talk about the quality of wines, but has a deeper meaning. And you will allow me to say, that in the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, there is a rich and fertile stratum of sub-soil that the common religious plow does not turn up. The surface of the vineyard is becoming exhausted, and unless we plough deeper we shall raise but a meagre crop.

That the doctrine of this lesson is not new, but belongs to an old philosophy and archaic wisdom-religion, I present as a proof but one more quotation. In the Dhammapada, one of the books of the sacred Canon of Buddhism, among the brief religious sentences of which it is made up we find these golden words: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts."

Five hundred years before Sakya Muni, Solomon says: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." (Prov. xxiii: 7.) A thousand years after Solomon, under the modifying and exalting touch of the higher wisdom in Jesus, it becomes the central principle in his scheme of human redemption, "Be it unto thee according to thy faith." (Matt. ix: 29.)

CHAPTER IX.

THE SCIENCE OF OBLIVESCENCE, OR THE ART OF FORGETTING A

MALADY.

THE possession of a good memory, that holds all truth in its capacious grasp ready for use whenever an occasion arises which calls for it, is one of the most valuable of our mental attainments. But there are times, and especially in disease and in our transient and permanent states of unhappiness, when we could be tempted to exchange it for the ability to forget, the power to change the direction of our thoughts, and expunge from the tablet of our minds the morbid ideas that will not depart at our bidding. Like a lingering and unwelcome visitor we bid them adieu and hope we are rid of them, but they come back again through the unbolted door. They are birds of evil omen, that not only fly unbidden over our heads, but build their nest in our outhouse, and will not be scared away. In the cure of a man's disease (or in the healing of ourselves), we are to attend to these false and fallacious ideas. Here is the seat of the trouble, and where the remedy is to be applied. In showing that disease exists on its spiritual and real side as a morbid idea, we have driven the animal to his lair, and can now suspend the chase and raise the question of the best method of extermination. A new idea, when it is so administered to an invalid as to be appropriated and to become a fixed mode of thinking, and is not hastily thrown off by a mental excretion, renews the entire man, soul and body. Since thought and existence are one and the same, if we change a man's mode of thinking and believing, we modify his whole life, as

certainly as an alteration in the direction of the wind from west to east will cause the vane on the church-spire to point eastward. But to dislodge from the mind of a patient a morbid idea, that has become fixed and maintains its hold with an obstinate steadfastness, is the most difficult work the intelligent medical practitioner has to perform, and one that few ever undertake to do, hence "They heal the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly," or in part only (Jer. viii: 11). To do this requires more skill than to amputate a limb or select the right drug. The common medical practice is like coming to the rescue of a man who has fallen among robbers; we secure his valuables, but leave the man in the hand of his enemies. To change the way of a patient's thinking, or even our own, might at first seem as much an impossibility as to change the skin of the Ethiopian, or the spots of the leopard. It is not enough to paint the skin of the one, or dye the hair of the other. This is superficial. After the return of Berkeley from a journey in France, he was stricken down with a fever. On his recovery, his friend, Dr. Arbuthnot, wrote to Dean Swift, "Poor philosopher Berkeley has now the idea of health, which was very hard to produce in him; for he had an idea of a strange fever upon him so strong that it was very hard to destroy it by introducing the contrary one." What the learned and justly celebrated physician meant for a good natured witticism, contains a profounder philosophy of human nature than the medical schools ever teach. We have before shown that the idea of a thing and the thing itself are not two distinct and separate entities, but are an indivisible unity and unbroken whole. The idea, as the German idealists maintain, is the ding an sich, the thing in itself; the object is the phenomenon, the appearance, the shadowy representation of it; or, as Swedenborg, following the terminology of the Schoolmen, would say, the one is the esse, the other the existere derived from it. This he always

affirms is the relation of the soul and its body. (Heavenly Secrets, 10,823.)

What we must aim at in the treatment of a given malady is permanently to efface the idea and belief of it. If things have existence to us only as we think of them, then to put them out of thought is practically to annihilate them, as we have shown in a previous volume. There are works on the art of memory with directions how to improve the retentive power of that faculty, and these volumes have their value in the education of the young. But what an invalid, who remembers too well and too much, most needs to learn is the art of forgetfulness, the blessed science of oblivescence. We are told in all works on mental philosophy, that we best and longest remember that on which we often and intently fix the attention. So, on the other hand, in proportion as we cease to attend to anything, or to fix the thoughts upon it, the idea fades from the mind and ceases to be to us an actuality.

It is oftentimes amusing, as well as marvellous, to see what an invalid can do when, for some reason, he forgets his disease. The coming into mind of some more influential thought, so that the idea of disease drops out of consciousness, will effect in reality as great results as those about which we read in the advertisements of patent medicines. We were knowing to a case of rheumatic lameness of long standing where the patient, under the diverting influence of an absorbing conversation, was seen to walk for a fourth of a mile without any show of lameness. At length he paused short in the road and exclaimed that he had forgotten to limp! and, as it was so late in the journey, he concluded not to begin. An older brother of ours, who was disabled by the severing of the large ligaments of the right ankle, in his wakeful hours could not step his foot on the floor; yet in a state of somnambulism would go where it would seem wellnigh impossible for a person in full wake