A SOFT SET OF CRITICS.

We have now learned a little of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy's celestial and terrestrial biography, as derived from the supramundane novel, Retrospection and Introspection, and some other sources. Bare allusion has been made to her Science and Health. But this, she says, "is my most important work, containing the complete statement of Christian Science."

The book, as we have seen, came among men—or, more strictly speaking, among less busy women—in 1875; and a thousand copies, we are told, comprised the first edition. "The critics," Mrs. Eddy informs us, pronounced it "wholly original," but a thing that would "never be read."

The foolish "critics"! How little they knew about "originality"! But they knew still less of Mrs. Eddy's "Spiritual afflatus," as she designates it, in the fervency of which "erudite systems of philosophy" had "melted"; nor did they realize her "divinely appointed mission"; for, in 1891, Science and Health had reached sixty-two editions. "Then the critics said" that "Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or certain German philosophers," had originated Mrs. Eddy's sole and well-monopolized "Science."[29]

Now if any "critics" ever did really shoot such soft intellectual putty as that, they ought certainly to have been condemned to the most heroic sort of mind-healing.

Think of George Berkeley, the most acute, the most logical mind of his age, standing with both feet on John Locke's "Essay of the Human Understanding," and attempting to pull himself up into the Infinite by mouthing the shibboleth that there is no finite!

And David Hume—the bonny skeptic, David—whose keenness brought the philosophy of his age to a logical standstill, and for the moment broke up all "metaphysics"! Poor David Hume! In the hands of what a "critic" it was, who imagined he had ever furnished a speck of meat for such a haggis as Science and Health!

For the moment, let us pass by Mr. Emerson, the Puritan mystic of New England transcendentalism, who beamed serenely down on mere "critics," and told them he hoped he "had never said anything that needed to be proved." But Mrs. Eddy's phrase, "certain German philosophers," is one that can only refer to Immanuel Kant, with his school of followers, who summed up the pure thinking of the modern world, as Plato and Aristotle summed up the pure thinking of the ancient world.

History tells us that Kant was a man who discovered the planet Uranus by mathematics before Herschel found it with a telescope, and who "had mastered all sciences" to date when he lived. Ripe with the knowledge of sixty years, he wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. This, the most profound and far-reaching treatise of any age, should have been named "The Analysis of Mind and Matter, Time and Space"; for such was really Kant's subject and achievement.

This extraordinary little German professor, Immanuel Kant, was the most regular and temperate of human beings; but he had a touch of asthma, for which, before all the medicinal properties of mind-cure were known, he took daily about a thimble-full of rum. Kant has been frightfully dealt with by his "critics," the most of whose heads he completely pulverized in connection with their activity in his behalf. But suppose Herr Professor Kant could have imagined that any "critic" on earth would ever accuse him of instigating the philosophy of Mary Baker G. Eddy! In that dread event, "the sage of KÖnigsberg," who once lost the thread of a lecture when a button he used to finger was cut from his coat, might have been so disconcerted, so sunk in amazement and despair, as to swallow his whole bottle of liquor, instead of the twentieth of a gill, and to burn his Critique of Pure Reason in a fit of delirium tremens.

It is well he was tempted into no such catastrophe; for, on getting on a bit, we shall find that every possible system of "metaphysics," to have any scientific foundation in modern thought, must refer itself to Kant's dissection of the universe.