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 of a malady are effaced, it will weaken its grasp upon us. Here is the direction in which we should perseveringly aim, whatever therapeutic devices we may employ. In certain cases, and under the proper conditions, it may be done instantaneously, but is more frequently effected gradually. A foggy atmosphere does not clear away at once, like the rolling up of the curtain in a theatre, but it slowly lifts to show us "the whitely shining hills of day." The sun in rising does not shoot up like a rocket from a vessel in distress, but the daybreak grows into the full morning.

When I affirm that to remove from the mind of an invalid the idea of a disease will cause the disappearance of his malady I feel myself standing on an established philosophical ground, an impregnable scientific position. In order to dislodge me from it, it must be shown that a person can have a pain, or discomfort, or any unhappiness, and not perceive it or know it. But the problem for a true medical philosophy to solve, is how to effect this radical change in the mental status of the patient. How can we revolutionize his mode of thinking, and pluck from his mind the deeply rooted idea of disease? Knowledge is power, and truth is omnipotent. That which is seemingly impossible is easily done if we know how to do it. Truth is the kingly principle. Say the Hindu sacred books, "Royal rule is in its essence truth. On truth the world is based. Truth is lord in the world. All things are founded on truth, and there is nothing higher than it."

We know it as a fact that has often come under our observation, that the dislodging from the mind of a patient of a morbid idea, with its acccompanying fear and unbelief, which has come to have a controlling influence, and the substitution in its place of the opposite idea and belief, has often effected an immediate and radical change in his physical condition. Let us take an illustrative case, for which nearly every one's memory will be able to furnish a fact parallel with it. During the prevalence of an epidemic fever, a person affected with a

slight cold, or any combination of disagreeable sensations, forms the idea that he is seized with the malady in its incipient stage. While this belief reigns undisturbed, he is, and will continue to be, sick of a fever. Under the dominating influence of this idea he suspends his business and takes to his bed. At this juncture of affairs, the family physician, in whose skill and judgment he implicitly relies, arrives on the scene. He is one of an ever-growing number, who is rising from the lower dignity of a physician, a dispenser of drugs, to the higher office of a doctor or teacher. On a careful and searching diagnosis of the case, he assures the patient that his anxiety is groundless, his fears without foundation; that he is labouring under an error, and that the dreaded malady is not a fixed actuality. This view of the case is accepted, and supplants and dethrones the other, and in a brief time, as if a mill-stone had been lifted from his condition, the man rises from disease to health, and to the active discharge of the duties of his calling.

It is to be remarked that fear as a form of unbelief, or rather misbelief, and which is the tap-root of many a disease, is but a suppression of faith, and not an extinction of the power or faculty of believing. Hence, when fear is removed, faith, its opposite, naturally and spontaneously arises. The allaying of the fears of a patient is equivalent to the excitation of a saving or healing faith. Just as when a spiral spring is pressed down by a superincumbent weight, if that is removed, the spring returns by its own elasticity to its proper position. So if, by the divine power of truth, we can lift from an invalid that which really holds him down, he will "arise, take up his bed, and walk."

Let us return to the supposed case we have before us. Hundreds of facts might be given which in principle are identical with it, and in all essential particulars are only repetitions of it. Let us carefully scrutinize the mental principles involved in the cure. There was a desire to get well, for we

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take it for granted that the man was not a professional invalid. This desire included in it a willingness to use the proper remedy. There was a confidence in the knowledge and skill of the physician, and this was sufficiently strong as of necessity to constitute a predisposition and tendency to believe his suggestions, and to adopt his ideas and way of thinking. There was also a ready submission of the will to the directions of the physician and faith in their efficacy. In this condition of mind, the kindly positive and authoritative affirmations of the physician changed the mode of the patient's thinking in regard to his disease. The idea of the fever was at once weakened, and obscured, and finally blotted out of the mind, and, with its disappearance, the disease vanished. It was like meeting a man descending a mountain road which we are ascending. We face him directly round in the opposite direction, take him by the hand and lead him calmly up toward the summit, with its view of the promised land. This case, carefully studied, will be found to contain, compressed into a small compass, the arcane spiritual philosophy of every cure effected by any of the prevailing methods, and especially of the marvels of healing wrought by the Christ. And by putting ourselves into the same attitude toward him to-day as the patient was supposed to have done toward his physician, he will heal us to-day in both soul and body. "He that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out" has never yet been proven false. If it does in your case, it will be the first in the history of the world.

How and by what means this change is to be wrought in the mental status of an invalid is a matter to be decided by the skill and judgment of the physician. There is no way in which it can be done without his consent and co-operation. Wilt thou be made whole, or wish you to get well? must be answered in the affirmative, verbally or silently. We can lift a man from the water, while drowning, by main strength and in spite of himself. But disease is not cured in that way.

We shall have to accommodate ourselves to the different stage of mental and spiritual development in which men are found. We must sometimes descend towards the level of their platform in order to raise them to ours. We must condescend to their position, and come into a certain sympathy with them in order to take them back with us to our higher view. This principle of sympathy is supposed by the Hindu Mozoomdar to furnish the key to the mystery of the cures effected by the Christ. But it is not sympathy with the disease, but sympathy with the true idea of the man which is obscured by the disease. By coming into sympathy with this, the two become stronger than one.

When we attribute the generation of diseased conditions of the body to some antecedent abnormality of mind, we do not mean to teach that a given disease, as rheumatism, or dyspepsia, is the instantaneous creation of a sudden thought, or the unexpected advent of an idea to our consciousness. The disease may be the fixed ultimation, or translation into a bodily expression of modes of thought and feeling long anterior to our first recognition of it. A person will say: "I was sick before I thought anything about it; as, for instance, I woke up in the night with a severe cold." This means in reality that you woke up thinking that you had caught a cold, or more properly that the cold had caught you. To say that you had a cold without thinking about it, is in reality affirming that you had a cold without knowing it; for you certainly never knew it until you thought of it. testifying to what you do not know, and, consequently, as a witness in this case, you are ruled out. You mean in what you say, that you awoke in the night and became conscious of certain unpleasant sensations, which were interpreted to mean a cold. But faith could have given a different meaning to them, and you would have escaped the cold. Or, if you had never thought anything about it, you would have remained until this day in blissful ignorance that you had ever had a cold.

Hence you are