The Independent
Health Magazine.

3 AMEN CORNER LONDON E.C.

VOL. V DECEMBER
No. 29. 1913

_There will come a day when physiologists, poets, and
philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one
another._--CLAUDE BERNARD.

AN INDICATION.

There are some statements, the very simplicity and truth of which
create a shock--for some people. For instance, there are certain
seekers after health who ignore and are shocked by the very obvious
truth that "brain is flesh." A brain poisoned by impure blood is no
fit instrument for the spirit to manifest through, and "mental
suggestion" must inevitably prove of no avail as a cure if the origin
of the impure blood be purely material.

It is just as futile, on the other hand, to treat the chronic
indigestion that arises from persistent worry, or indulgence in
passion, by one change after another in the dietary. The founder of
homoeopathy insisted that there was no such thing as a physical
"symptom" without corresponding mental and moral symptoms. "Not soul
helps flesh more than flesh helps soul." Thus the Scientist and the
Poet come to the same truth, albeit by different ways.--[EDS.]

PLAIN WORDS AND COLOURED PICTURES.

While most of us would at first sight find fault with Mr G.K.
Chesterton's sweeping advice--

"And don't believe in anything
That can't be told in coloured pictures,"

many would probably end by endorsing it. But we should do so only
because we were able to give a very wide and varied meaning to
"coloured pictures."

No one ever made a coloured picture of the "wild west wind"; but there
are plenty of coloured pictures in which there is no mistaking its
presence. We all believe in wireless telegraphy (now that it is an
accomplished fact) which is, in itself, untranslatable into colour or
line; but its mechanism can be photographed, and its results in the
world of men and ships are in all the illustrated papers. Music, which
is pure sound, is to some the surest path to the Reality behind this
outward show things; yet to some at least of such music is indeed form
and colour, even though the colours be beyond the rainbow. For in
truth, everything worth believing in, all those things, those ideas,
which renew the springs of our life, have form and they