and so true, that to gainsay it would be to acknowledge ignorance
of its teaching; to admit intellectual shortsightedness. (This is
perhaps the reason for the supercilious superiority of many Christian
Scientists; they imagine that no one perceives this truth but
themselves.) And once grasped, is it not self-evident, and does not all
else follow in consequence? At first sight it would indeed appear so!

The great error, however, lies here. Because this fact is
_theoretically_ true, it is not _practically_ true also. We may admit
the one; we cannot accept the other. The fallacy has been clearly
pointed out by Sir Oliver Lodge (_Hibbert Journal_, January, 1905), and
I cannot do better than to quote his words in this connection. He says:

"We cannot be permanently satisfied with dualism, but it is
possible to be over-hasty and also too precisely insistent. There
are those who seem to think that a monistic view of existence
precludes the legitimacy of speaking of soul and body, or of God
and spiritual things, or of guidance and management, at all; that
is to say, they seem to think that because these things can be
_ultimately_ unified, therefore they are unified proximately and
for practical purposes. We might as well urge that it is incorrect
to speak of the chemical elements, or of the various materials with
which, in daily life, we have to deal, or of the structures in
which we live, or which we see and handle, as separate and real
things, because in the last resort we believe that they may all be
reduced to a segregation of corpuscles, or to some other mode of
unity.... The language of dualism or of multiplism is not incorrect
or inappropriable or superseded because we catch ideal glimpses of
an ultimate unity; nor would it be any the less appropriable if the
underlying unity could be more clearly or completely grasped. The
material world may be an aspect of the spiritual world, or _vice
versa_ perhaps; or both may be aspects of something else; but both
are realities, just the same, and there need be no hesitation in
speaking of them clearly and distinctly as, for practical purposes,
separate entities."

This, it seems to me, disposes of the argument for Christian Science
drawn from idealism. No matter whether the material world exists or not,
we always have to live _as if_ it existed. If we close our eyes and