terial substances, astronomical
calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories ... will
ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of spirit."
"Earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity" are merely
the "vapid fury of mortal mind." "Heat and cold are products of
mind"--even a "mill at work, or the action of a water wheel," is only a
manifestation of "mortal mind force." Apart from mortal belief, there is
no such thing as climate.

"Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and powers supposed to belong to
matter are constituents of mind," Mrs. Eddy says. By this she does not
mean that these forces exist, for us, in our minds, but that at some
time in the dim past "mortal mind" imagined matter and imagined these
properties in it. Christ, she says, was able to walk upon the water and
to roll away the stone of the sepulcher because he had overcome the
human _belief_ in the laws of gravity. (Yet, Mrs. Eddy is continually
reminding us that the fall of an apple led Newton to discover a great
law, etc.) "Geology," Mrs. Eddy says, "has never explained the earth's
formations. It cannot explain them." "Natural Science is not really
natural or scientific, because it is deduced from the evidences of the
senses." "Vertebra, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are evolved by
mortal and material thought." "Theorizing about man's development from
mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men, amounts to nothing in
the right direction, and very much in the wrong." But it is not only
with the natural sciences that Mrs. Eddy is displeased. "Human history,"
she says, "needs to be revised, and the _material record expunged_."

Having dismissed the history of the race as trivial, the natural
sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and
matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious
theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, but
ingenious.

_Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis_

Mrs. Eddy says that her theory of the universe is founded, not upon
human wisdom, but upon the Bible; and so it is, but she uses both
addition and subtraction very liberally to get her Biblical
corroboration. The Bible may be interpreted in two ways, Mrs. Eddy says,
literally and spiritually, and what she sets out to do is to give us the
spiritual interpretation. Her method is simple. She starts with the
propositions that all is God and that there is no matter, and then
rec