Gordon Clark

“ Kant has proved to us that no phenomenon of consciousness—no matter, no motion, no sensation—and, beyond all these, no time and no space, in which all the rest appear—has, or can have, any existence, except as put into unity, form, and order, by the unity, form, and order of mind. If both "the synthesis of apprehension" and "the synthesis of apperception" enter into any state of consciousness named matter, to give it birth, there is no possibility that the element of intelligence can be an after-birth of the process. ”

“ Space is so derived; hence all things in space, which is the "form," the "condition" of their existence, must partake of its nature, which is pure extension, pure "given quantity," as he designates it. But why does the shape of a material body belong to "pure intuition," and come from mind? Simply because the shape (let it be of a stone) is merely the objected "synthesis of apprehension," in which the properties of the stone, as impressions of sense, are unified, but in accordance with their special variety. The shape is their "figurative synthesis," their "synthesis speciosa." ”

“ But, as a man knows not himself, he reasons as though he were one of the fixtures of his house, or body.... What is the true definition of death. Death is the name of an idea.... So the destruction of an idea is death." Man "is dying and living all the time to error, till he dies the death of all his opinions and beliefs. Therefore to be free from death is to be alive in truth." In no other way than this, would Dr. Quimby even recognize such a fact as death. ”

“ But, in this evolution, man—or say rather and always the principle of sensation and consciousness in which man inheres—is merely the general form, diversely individualized, of the One All-Inclusive Spirit in the activity of self-manifestation. The earth, the sun, moon, and stars, the human body, its house and the landscape, with every particle of all of them, are outwoven of universal Spirit through the loom of subjective being and unity. ”

“ The radical error of those who believe that we perceive things as they are, consists in mistaking a metaphor for a fact, and believing that the mind is a mirror in which external objects are reflected. But, as Bacon finely says, 'The human understanding is like an unequal mirror to the rays of things, which, mixing its own nature with the nature of things, distorts and perverts them.' We attribute heat to fire, and color to the flower, heat and color being states of our consciousness, occasioned by the fire and the flower under certain conditions. ”

“ By being the first, it unifies any and every manifold of sense-effects; by being the second, it re-presents the product—throws it out; by being the third, it apprehends the externalisation, and a percept is born. Apperception, or full consciousness, is the same self-activity, self-reflex, self-sight, transformed into "understanding." Thus, mind is essentially a triad as well as a unit. But, if so, it must reflect itself to conception as a "Quantity"—a sum of its own phases; and in these phases, it is a "Unity," a "Plurality," and a "Totality." ”

“ About a quarter of a century ago, Boston, the city of modified Puritans and keen business thrift, evolved a new religion. Modern Boston, however, being nothing if not "scientific," the new religion tipped its wings with the new time, and soared aloft in the name of "Christian Science."
In a world not quite converted to this "science," facts sometimes fall behind assertions. But the sect of Christian Science now claims to number in its fold a million sheep. ”

“ Recapitulating what we have been over, it appears that "metaphysical healing" is simply the suggestion and determination of health—the ideal photograph, as it were, of health—transferred from the well to the ill, in the conviction that Universal Spirit is the principle of all health, which we may receive from its Source by opening ourselves to it. That is to say, the health of the Infinite Spirit, so far as absorbed by a finite spirit, corrects finite errors of mind, and the mind, thus corrected, corrects, or cures, the body. Such, certainly, was the "truth-cure" of Phineas P. Quimby. ”

“ Every one of them is a relation to subjectivity, a result of impact on subjectivity, and is in the object only as reflecting or re-presenting there the sensuous nature of a subject. But these various "effects on various senses," these merely subjective separates—how do they get united into one thing? What constitutes the unity of sensuous manifolds? Every phenomenon being an essential plurality—a lot of "sense-effects"—what closes together the various effects on various human senses, called the properties of a stone, into the one phenomenal object, the stone itself. ”

“ Eddy tells us that "no human pen or tongue" taught her "the science of mind-healing," we are obliged to infer that Dr. Quimby was more than human. How greatly would the plain but gifted Quimby have been shocked, had he foreknown that Mrs. Eddy would thus apotheosize him.
Through Science and Health we learn that "Christian Science" reveals, "incontrovertibly," that "Mind is All-in-all"—the only "realities" being "the divine Mind and idea." We learn, further, that this divine Mind is God, that God's idea is Man, and that by authority of Webster an "idea" is "an image in mind." ”

“ Since the days of Immanuel Kant, no philosophy, no rational theology, no ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any real basis in thought—the reason being that he saw through, and explained, the principle of universal relativity, the law of scientific idealism, and relaid the whole structure, from the corner-stone up. ”

“ That is to say, material things—whatever we see or feel, hear, taste or smell—while existent and real—while practically what every one takes them to be—are made so through relativity. Or, as Kant put it, every "phenomenon"—meaning every object or fact of sensation—is a "re-presentation"; that is, some lot of effects on our sensuous nature, bound together into a unity of them, the unity thus formed becoming an object of awareness, a "percept."
Scientific idealism does not question the given duality of the cosmos, which appears to us as what we call "mind and matter." ”

“ If we analyze the proposition that all mental phenomena are the effects or products of material phenomena, all that it means amounts to this: that whenever those states of consciousness which we call sensation, or emotion, or thought, come into existence, complete investigation will show good reason for the belief that they are preceded by those other phenomena of consciousness to which we give the names of matter and motion. All material changes appear, in the long run, to be modes of motion; but our knowledge of motion is nothing but that of a change in the place and order of our sensations ”

“ Quimby, as we have seen, had sown the seed of the whole modern field of "mental healing," and Mrs. Eddy, as Mary M. Patterson, had told the whole truth about it. But Quimby's simple doctrine was that matter is a phase of mind; and hence that the mind of man, as an inlet of God's truth and power, can change the body and cure disease. Appropriating this thought, Mrs. Eddy had stretched it out and blown it up into the ponderous misfit labeled "Christian Science." ”

“ Christian Science, with Science and Health, being present avatars to dispel sin and cure disease, such a science and such a book necessarily admit sickness and sin, both implicitly and explicitly. Now what is to be done in such a dilemma? Why, mortal mind, matter, evil, and all afflictions, while "nothing," are a kind of nothing that may be mentioned as "error" and ultimate "self-nullity." Thus, while Eddy Science, alias "Christian Science," has no real Devil, it has a very practical seeming Devil, and whips him from stump to stump with logic worse than himself. ”

“ As Aristotle, from his ontological investigations, found that matter, if regarded as an absolute independence—an unrelated thing in itself—is no thing, but only chaotic indeterminateness—formless "potentiality"—so Kant, from his psychological inquiry—his dissection of phenomena as existent through perception—found the same truth in deeper significance. The entire principle of unity, Whether in a feeling, a thought, a material object, or the universe as a whole, can only exist through the principle of mind. ”

“ To be an identity of mind, for instance, to the conditions of subjectivity, reason must receive them into its unity, which thus becomes their totality. Now what is the objective re-presentation, the rational conception of the totality of subjective conditions? It is simply the "transcendental idea" of pure subjectiveness, or Soul. In the same way the totality of objective phenomenal conditions, is the idea of the Universe; while the totality of all conditions, both subjective and objective, is the idea of that in which all mind and all matter are related as their final cause or reason—God. ”

“ We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the re-presentation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite are not in themselves the same as our re-presentations of them in intuition, nor are their relations so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear.... ”

“ Dr. Quimby was not an educated man in the technical meaning of the term; but, through his experiments in mesmerism and his personal experiences, he was led directly to what in the history of philosophy is called "absolute idealism." Until his own conclusions were fully reached, he knew nothing, from literature, even of Berkeley; but when Berkeley's writings were unfolded to him, he at once said, in his plain, straightforward way, that they were true, and that he "agreed" with them. To him, the universe was mind, and all things were "ideas." ”

“ I have employed electro-magnetism and animal magnetism, and for a brief period I have felt relief ... but in no instance did I get rid of a return of all my ailments, because I had not been helped out of the error in which opinions involve us. My operator believed in disease independent of mind; hence I [Pg 43] could not be wiser than my teacher. But now I can see, dimly at first, and only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works; and just in proportion to my right perception of truth is my recovery. ”

“ And the nature of space and time need not be anything more objective than the nature of matter in general, but can be derived, too, from "the mode in which the subject is affected." "But," says Kant, "all conjunction" is "an act of the understanding," and "can not be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition"; by which he means that time could never be a conjunct of times, space a conjunct of spaces, nor a stone the conjunct of its properties—each a "synthesis" of a "manifold content"—unless made so by the synthetical unity of a priori mind. ”

“ Now, apart from the name and the church of Christian Science, there are many people in Boston and its universal radiations—very intelligent and honest people, too—who utterly discard Mrs. Eddy and her teachings, yet hold the general doctrine on which she speculates—the now well-known doctrine that mind governs matter, and that the soul can cure the body of disease. The teaching of these people may simply be termed "mental healing," though they say also "mental science," sometimes "metaphysics" and comprehensively "the new thought." ”

“ Yet nearly a hundred years before this investigation Kant showed precisely what this so-called "unknowable" is. He showed that mind, in all stages and states—mind in itself—is a synthetical unity of awareness. In germ, as "unconscious understanding"—as the mind of sense—its function is to be simply apprehensive of, and thus to conjoin in its instinctive cognizance, some "manifold" contained in a "nervous shock," or in various sense-effects, into some unity; which then, as itself apprehended, or made a reflex, becomes an impression, an image, an object. ”

“ That we can "jump" our condition, before we get out of it, is the most tremendous paradox ever presented to the human mind; but the sequences—even physical—of systematically opening the finite soul to the Infinite Spirit may be incalculable. The revival, or definite rediscovery, in modern times, of healing the sick by the soul and the laying-on of hands, came to pass some fifty years ago, in the United States, through the honest, single-minded, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. ”

“ Spirit-background—Infinite Spirit "in itself"—which is revealed, and can only be revealed, to the finite, as transformed through fixed modes of finite receptivity.
A man, therefore, is simply an individualization of the process by which the Absolute—That Which Is—expresses itself and lives. Whatever may be our environment under some changed state of our receptivity—say "the future life"—our environment of spirit objected through sense, in space and time, is the environment of matter; and the human body is a part of it. ”

“ Perception is nothing more than a state of the percipient, a state of consciousness.... Of every change in our sensation we are conscious, and in time we learn to give definite names and forms to the causes of these changes. But in the fact of consciousness there is nothing beyond consciousness. In our perceptions we are conscious only of the changes which have taken [Pg 164] place within us.... All we can do is to identify certain external appearances with certain internal changes.... We conclude, therefore, that the world per se in nowise resembles the world as it appears to us. ”