Thereat the world did not come to an end, but went right on with the production of quacks, dupes, and "loyal students."
"Mother Eddy" and her flock "in Science" derive a considerable part of their income from a glib use of the word "Metaphysics." But what the "Church Scientist" has omitted to learn about the real import of that word would make a volume even larger than _Science and Health_.
As unreservedly admitted in our present essay, there is no trouble about a spiritual derivation of the universe. In the declaratory, religious form, the New Testament is a sufficient example of this doctrine. In the philosophical form the names of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom resolved all things into the principle of "Mind," summarized the subject for the ancient world. The modern world has now given three hundred years to the same theme, and, however well or ill aware of the fact, has reached the same end, but wholly without the assistance of any pushing, dodging adventuress, with a little set of abstract ideas and much screaming of "Science."
Leaving lighter themes for the moment, let us venture on a brief survey of this ground.
There are just two possible ways of analyzing things. One way is to set the world with its particulars before the eye, look at it, and accept what we see. Then we may go to work on phenomena, dissecting and generalizing. This is the way of physics--a road that _never_ leads to _meta_-physics. It is the common turnpike of material science--of "positivism." In it travel all such men, say, as Dr. Ernst Hæckel: also all such men as the late Parson John Jasper, the colored preacher of Virginia, who, seeing the sun move round the earth, settled the fact in that way.
The one other way of dissecting the universe is to examine the _means_ through which things are presented to us, and thus to ascertain what effect the means may have in the production and nature of the things. This method of investigation has ultimated in what has been summed up as "Scientific Idealism."
Scientific idealism is the knowledge which every one may get even from his first lessons in optics, that things of matter--the objects of our five senses--are constituted such through the structure and action of these senses themselves. 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."