the human limb would be replaced as
readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers
produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the
blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."

"Obesity," Mrs. Eddy says, "is _an adipose belief of yourself as a
substance_."

_Mrs. Eddy's Physiology_

The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy
and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical
facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father
"plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several
minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain
under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a
fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under
water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct
insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species
of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was
ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger
which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have
nothing to do with pain, because, she states, "_the nerve is gone_"!

Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind
causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has
created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the
flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast
into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might
produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard
enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce
the fire by willing it.

The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind.
Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they
are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to
admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him.
This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is
deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive
processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire
consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the
cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such
tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.

_Mrs. Eddy's Vie