a divine plant, with both flower and fruit, which exists, as in its native habitat, in the inmost soul of every man. The signs of the times point unerringly to the coming of a fuller recognition of this ancient truth, and it is the faint light in the east, indicating the approach of a better day for humanity. There are, within the enclosure of our inner being, certain dormant, because unused, spiritual energies and potencies that can save the soul and heal the body of its maladies. To guide these out into conscious and intelligent action, is the end we shall keep steadily in view in these elementary lessons in transcendental philosophy. We have endeavoured to restore the ancient doctrine of faith to its primitive meaning, as a saving, healing power. How far we have succeeded, we must leave the reader to judge. 3 BEACON STREET, Boston, Dec. 25, 1884. CONTENTS. PAGE I V. Happiness and Health, and where they are to be found VI. The Real and the Apparent in Thought, or the Impossible X. The Incipient Idea of Recovery and Whence Does it Come? 79 XI. What is it to be Spiritual, and, How may we Become so? . 90 XVI. The Nature and Right Use of the Will XVII. The Universal Life-Principle, and its Occult Properties and XXI. The Summit of Christian Knowledge, or the Mystery of the.. Christ, and its Saving Influence XXII. The Relation of Jesus to the Christ and to Man XXIII. The Kabalistic Justice and Paul's Righteousness of Faith. . 175 182 HEALING BY FAITH. CHAPTER I. WHAT ARE IDEAS? AND WHAT IS IDEALISM? As idealism in opposition to materialism constitutes the philosophic basis on which the psychological or phrenopathic system of cure rests, it is necessary at the outset of our inquiries to form a clear conception of what is meant by that term. Its principles are unanswerably set forth in the work of Bishop Berkeley, entitled "The Principles of Human Knowledge," published in the year 1710. The doctrines taught by Berkeley were subsequently presented under modifications by a succession of German philosophers, among whom we prominently name Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. According to Lossius, “Idealism is the assertion that matter (and consequently the human body) is only a sensuous seeming, and that spiritual essences are the only real things in the world." This doctrine was taught by Plato, who derived it from Pythagoras and the occult philosophy of Egypt, Chaldea, and India. It is as old as the human race. From the remotest antiquity, it was taught in the Vedas and in all the Oriental philosophies. Says Krug: "Idealism is that system of philosophy which considers the existent or actual as a mere ideal." The definition of Brockhaus is to the same effect: "Idealism, in antithesis to realism, is that philosophical system which maintains not only that the spiritual or ideal is the original, B but that it is the sole actuality; so that we can concede to the objects of the senses no more than the character of a phenomenal (or apparent) world, educed by ideal activities." ("Real Encyclopädie," Eleventh Ed., 1866.) In another place, he defines idealism to be "that philosophical view which regards what is thought as alone the actually existent." This is the best definition, and accords perfectly with the teaching of the true idealists of all ages and countries. Thought," says the Kabala, "is the source of all that is." It is the first Sephira or emanation from God. It is the first begotten, the first-born from the "Unknown." It is the I Am, the highest manifestation of God in man, and the most real thing in the universe, -that from which everything springs, and to which in its last analysis it can be reduced. But it is necessary to inquire into the nature of ideas, and their relation to external things, and all the objects of the sense-world. Says Thomas Taylor, in the introduction to the "Parmenides" of Plato: "To the question, what kind of things, or beings, ideas are, we may answer with Zenocrates, according to the relation of Proclus, that they are the exemplary causes of things which perpetually subsist according to nature. They are exemplars (or the living patterns or models of things) indeed, because the final cause, or the good (the supreme God), is superior to them, and that which is properly the efficient cause, or the demiurgic intellect, is of an inferior ordination. But they are the exemplars of things according to nature, because there are no ideas of things unnatural or artificial; and of such natural things as are perpetual, because there are no ideas of mutable particulars." (Taylor's translation of Plato, p. 254.) This is a comprehensive statement of the nature of the Platonic ideas. According to this view, the ideal is the causal, as the ideal picture in the mind of the artist is the necessary cause of the picture on the canvas. The latter, though only a resemblance, could not exist without the former, because there can be no resemblance that is not the resemblance 4 |