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The Romance of Metaphysics THE ROMANCE OF METAPHYSICS --------------------------------------------------- AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY, THEORY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN METAPHYSICS ~•~ By ISRAEL REGARDIE --------------------------------------------------- 1 "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain." (Psalm 127.) "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus." (Phil. 2, v. 5-6.) 2 I dedicate this book to DOROTHY 3 -------------------------------------------------------------- F O R E W O R D -------------------------------------------------------------- THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE WAR. Completed some months before I entered in the armed forces early in 1942, the manuscript has been in storage ever since. It was written primarily to establish certain points of relationship between the various metaphysical schemes and fundamental concepts of modern psychology. It has a sort of tentative personal meaning. Possibly a great deal more by way of synthesis could be acomplished to-day, with increased experience and knowledge of what psychiatry and psychoanalysis represent. However, I have decided to let the manuscript remain in its present form, unaltered and unmodified, since it was a spontaneous creative effort and may therefore serve some useful purpose to other students. Throughout, I have been moved by a sense of what I conceived to be fairness to the metaphysical schemes described. I have tried to avoid harsh prejudiced criticism. Nor have I gone too deeply into basic psychological concepts of the growth and structure of the psyche and the dynamic mechanisms it daily employs. However, such concepts are implicit in all the comments ventured in the different parts of the work. If readers establish further relationships, I would be deeply obliged if they would inform me of their ideas. Possibly at a later date, and in another edition, these can be incorporated into the body of the text. ISRAEL REGARDIE 4 -------------------------------------------------------------- C O N T E N T S -------------------------------------------------------------- PAGE FOREWORD . 4 PART ONE - Christian Science INTRODUCTORY . 7 MESMERISM . 14 PHILOSOPHY . 29 MARY BAKER EDDY . 43 METAPHYSIC . 58 PART TWO - New Thought I. N. T. A. 69 NEVILLE . 91 PART THREE - Unity School of Christianity HISTORY . 109 TEACHING . 123 PART FOUR - A Newer Approach RELAXATION AS A PRELIMINARY . 143 PRAYER . 154 5 P A R T O N E C H R I S T I A N S C I E N C E 6 -------------------------------------------------------------- I N T R O D U C T O R Y -------------------------------------------------------------- IT WAS ON JUNE 13TH, 1988 that delegates from every state in the union gathered in response to Mrs. Eddy's appeal "to let no consideration bend or outweigh your purpose to be in Chicago." Delegates and students arrived by the trainload. This high-water mark in the development of Christian Science was the nation-wide convention called in Chicago by the National Christian Scientist association. When, on the second day of the convention, the doors of the Central Music Hall were opened wide, eight hundred delegates and three thousand eager visitors clamoured to see her who had come to be known as the "Boston Prophetes." "When she entered," narrates Stephen Zweig dramatically in the chapter on Mary Baker Eddy in his work Three Mental Healers, "the whole assembly rose to greet her. A hush fell upon them as she recited the first verse of the Ninety-first Psalm: 'He that dweleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.' Then she began to speak, without notes, and, moved by the enthusiasm of her audience, was so enthralling that (as on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln's famous speech at Bloomington) even the reporters were spellbound and forgot to take notes. No sooner had she finished, than the crowd stormed the platform, not a few of them being invalids who had come in the hope of cure. Some of these stretched forth paralysed hands and begged for help. Men wrestled with one another to get near her and touch her dress. Mothers who could not get through the crowd held up their children and shouted for a blessing. Many of the sick declared themselves cured on the spot, as by miracle. There was a real danger in this outburst of enthusiasm, and the faithful had to form a cordon to protect the heroine of the hour from injury." This experience surely was the peak of the life of a most unusual and amazing woman. Born a nobody, so to say, without great charm or the beauty which ordinarily we think a woman should possess as one of the adjuncts of success, suffering most of her life from various ailments, penniless and helpless for years, here was Mary Baker Eddy in the rôle, literally, of a saint. She was the centre of a tremendous stream or movement, which since her day had spread entirely around the world. It is calculated to be the one of the most powerful religious movements of our day and age. Inestimable is its wealth - its influence incalculable - so completely has it penetrated and infiltrated the thinking of our time. One wit has expressed it that when whoever it is that composes popular jokes takes cognisance of any movement, that movement is important. If this be one of the indicies of importance, then since there are many popular jokes about Christian Science, by that token it has achieved great importance and success. This woman Mary Baker Eddy was consumed by one idea, which some critics assume to have been an extremely questionable idea. But, credit by hers, she thought of absolutely nothing else. It consumed her. She had only this one standpoint. To this, however, she clung as though her feet had emerged from solid rock. Motionless and unshakeable like the rock from which she had emerged, deaf to every objection, sound or otherwise, with her frail lever of "God is truth, intelligence, life and love, and both mortal mind and matter are error," she attempted to move the world. In twenty years, out of a pre-existing maze of metaphysical confusion, she 7 created a new method of religio-therapeutics. She established a doctrine which was promulgated in textbooks credited with divine inspiration, counting its adherents by the myriad, with colleges and periodicals of its own. A church was established and numerous churches were built. She appointed a council of preachers, practitioners and lay-priests, and not least of all, won for herself a private fortune amounting to three million dollars. This last acquisition alone would have been an enormous achievement for any woman who, alone and lonely, was penniless for fifty years. As Stephen Zweig has said referring to Science and Health, "anything which exerts an influence throughout the world, modifying the thoughts and lives of millions, is certainly important in a psychological sense; and besides, the circumstances under which the book came into existence indicate that its author must have been possessed of extraordinary resolution, must have been endowed with a heroism rare in our days." Because of this indubitable importance of Mary Baker Eddy, it is incumbent upon those of us living today to trace out the various lines of thought that influenced and produced her. It is often asserted that great characters are the products of their age. They are evoked by the needs of the people around them. Evoked, they voice the need and aspiration of those who, thaumaturgically, evoked them. The age in which she lived was a strange one. Some have thought it a materialistic one - an age devoted solely to the aquisition of the dollar and the neglect of high spiritual principle. The opposite is true, however. People were seeking and investigating vigorously. Their minds and spirits were alive, even if their critical sense was dull. While she was still in her twenties, the towns of her New England background were the playground of a variety of neo-occult cults, each displaying its wares with considerable vitality. Animal magnetism and mesmerism, clairvoyance, mental healing and spiritualism - all these, individually and collectively, served as a symbol of reaction, of protest against the prevailing agnosticism and lack of spiritual security of the times. Moreover, we must not neglect mention of Emerson. He had just previously published his essay on "Nature," with its clearly defined idealism, its uncompromising opposition to any materialistic concept of life and the world. It was in this milieu that Mary Baker Eddy was born and lived. It was a world in which grossly opposing intellectual forces were at war, and it was by these forces that she was torn. The conflict was much too much to be borne easily by her, causing a pendulum swing of her mind out of the realm of such dichotomy. Science and scientific research had thrust out their feelers, and were firmly establishing themselves on a sound footing. In opposition, there were the churches and organised religion, entrenched in their tradition, and from them all inspiration and spiritual spontaneity had departed. In the middle were spiritualism and some of the mesmeric cults, which in reality stood for a species of transcendental materialism. Mrs. Eddy severed any intellectual contact with all of them by denying substance and reality to matter, and affirming that mind and mind only is the one and supreme reality. God was the One Mind, and all was derived from Him, lived in Him and partook of His divine nature of truth, life and love. Consequently, matter was but a seeming, an illusion which blinded us sensuously to the true state of affairs. Her work, in one sense therefore, was the expression of her age. It was the cry of the outraged soul of the mass of mankind.
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