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The true spiritual physician will never forget, whatever the temptation may be to do so, that there is a higher therapeutic efficiency in an idea than in any drug known to medical science. In the language of the learned German professor, Johannes Müller, "The influence of ideas upon the body gives rise to a great variety of phenomena, which border on the marvellous." He illustrates this by a case mentioned by Pictet. A young lady who wished to experience the intoxicating effects of the nitrous oxide gas, which she had at different times before inhaled, came to Pictet for that purpose. But, in order to test the power of the imagination, common atmospheric air was given to her. She had scarcely taken two or three inspirations of it, when she became insensible and exhibited all the effects of the nitrous oxide. The question arises, what was it that so affected her? Was it anything more than an idea, and a belief? Surely then the influence attributed by Jesus to simple faith is not unreasonable, though its saving power is discounted in these days of gross material medication. The influence of ideas, Müller asserts, when they are combined with a state of emotion, generally extends in all directions, affecting the senses, motions, and secretions. But even simple ideas, unattended by any excited state of the feelings, produce most marked effects upon the body. (Müller's "Elements of Physiology," Vol. II., p. 1392.) This is an important testimony from a high authority.

Müller lays down the general law that an idea having reference to a secretion (and the same is true of any physiological action) causes a stream of nervous energy to be directed towards the secreting organ, and if the mind is at the same time influenced by an emotion, the effect just mentioned is more marked. But what Müller denominates the nervous 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 towards 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 plough 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: 66 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 out-house, 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 here 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," 10823.)

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