Chapter XII - Christian Science Practice
Sin a form of insanity
408:1
Every sort of sickness is error, – that is, sickness is
Every sort of sickness is error, – that is, sickness is
loss of harmony. This view is not altered by the fact
that sin is worse than sickness, and sickness is not ac-
knowledged nor discovered to be error by many who are
sick.
408:6
There is a universal insanity of so-called health, which
There is a universal insanity of so-called health, which
mistakes fable for fact throughout the entire round of the
material senses, but this general craze cannot, in a scien-
tific diagnosis, shield the individual case from the special
name of insanity. Those unfortunate people who are
committed to insane asylums are only so many distinctly
defined instances of the baneful effects of illusion on mor-
tal minds and bodies.
Drugs and brain-lobes
408:14
The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use
The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use
of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a mild species of
insanity. Can drugs go of their own accord
to the brain and destroy the so-called inflam-
mation of disordered functions, thus reaching mortal
mind through matter? Drugs do not affect a corpse, and
Truth does not distribute drugs through the blood, and
from them derive a supposed effect on intelligence and sen-
timent. A dislocation of the tarsal joint would produce
insanity as perceptibly as would congestion of the brain,
were it not that mortal mind thinks that the tarsal joint is
less intimately connected with the mind than is the brain.
Reverse the belief, and the results would be perceptibly
different.
Matter and animate error
408:28
The unconscious thought in the corporeal substra-
The unconscious thought in the corporeal substra-
tum of brain produces no effect, and that condition of
the body which we call sensation in matter
is unreal. Mortal mind is ignorant of it-
self, – ignorant of the errors it includes and of their