Chapter 15: 'Science and Health with Key to The Scriptures' by Mary Baker Eddy

Chapter XV - Genesis

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must father these absurdities, for both the material senses

and their reports are unnatural, impossible, and unreal.

The real producer

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Either Mind produces, or it is produced. If Mind is

first, it cannot produce its opposite in quality and quantity,

called matter. If matter is first, it cannot pro-

duce Mind. Like produces like. In natural

history, the bird is not the product of a beast. In spiritual

history, matter is not the progenitor of Mind.

The ascent of species

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One distinguished naturalist argues that mortals spring

from eggs and in races. Mr. Darwin admits this, but he

adds that mankind has ascended through all

the lower grades of existence. Evolution de-

scribes the gradations of human belief, but it does not

acknowledge the method of divine Mind, nor see that ma-

terial methods are impossible in divine Science and that

all Science is of God, not of man.

Transmitted peculiarities

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Naturalists ask: "What can there be, of a material

nature, transmitted through these bodies called eggs, –

themselves composed of the simplest material

elements, – by which all peculiarities of an-

cestry, belonging to either sex, are brought down from

generation to generation?" The question of the natu-

ralist amounts to this: How can matter originate or trans-

mit mind? We answer that it cannot. Darkness and

doubt encompass thought, so long as it bases creation on

materiality. From a material standpoint, "Canst thou

by searching find out God?" All must be Mind, or

else all must be matter. Neither can produce the other.

Mind is immortal; but error declares that the material

seed must decay in order to propagate its species, and

the resulting germ is doomed to the same routine.

Causation not in matter

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The ancient and hypothetical question, Which is first,

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the egg or the bird? is answered, if the egg produces the

parent. But we cannot stop here. Another question

follows: Who or what produces the parent of

the egg? That the earth was hatched from the

"egg of night" was once an accepted theory. Heathen

philosophy, modern geology, and all other material hy-

potheses deal with causation as contingent on matter

and as necessarily apparent to the corporeal senses, even

where the proof requisite to sustain this assumption is un-

discovered. Mortal theories make friends of sin, sickness,

and death; whereas the spiritual scientific facts of exist-

ence include no member of this dolorous and fatal triad.

Emergence of mortals

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Human experience in mortal life, which starts from an

egg, corresponds with that of Job, when he says, "Man

that is born of a woman is of few days, and

full of trouble." Mortals must emerge from

this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck

open their shells with Christian Science, and look outward

and upward. But thought, loosened from a material

basis but not yet instructed by Science, may become wild

with freedom and so be self-contradictory.

Persistence of species

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From a material source flows no remedy for sorrow,

sin, and death, for the redeeming power, from the ills

they occasion, is not in egg nor in dust. The

blending tints of leaf and flower show the

order of matter to be the order of mortal mind. The

intermixture of different species, urged to its utmost

limits, results in a return to the original species. Thus

it is learned that matter is a manifestation of mortal

mind, and that matter always surrenders its claims when

the perfect and eternal Mind is understood.

Better basis than embryology

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Naturalists describe the origin of mortal and material