he root of so many ills, the seat of so many
pains, matter goes with the rest. Mrs. Eddy is not always consistent in
her consideration of matter; sometimes she confines herself to saying
that there is neither sensation nor life in matter--which may be true
enough save as matter both affords the material for sensation and
conditions its forms, which is an immense qualification,--but again and
again she calls matter an illusion. Consistently the laws of physics and
chemistry should disappear with the laws of hygiene and medicine, but
Mrs. Eddy does not go so far as that though it would be difficult to
find a logical stopping place once you have taken this line. Mortal mind
is apparently the source of all these illusions.

Mrs. Eddy's disposal of matter, along with her constant return to its
misleading mastery in experience is an outstanding aspect of her book.
The writer is inclined to believe that Mrs. Eddy's formula: "There is
... no matter in life and no life in matter," is an echo of Tyndall's
famous utterance--made about the time she was working with her
system--that he found "in matter the promise and potency of all life."
There is surprisingly little reference in "Science and Health" to
philosophic or scientific sources. Cutter's physiology is quoted in some
editions--an old textbook which the writer remembers to have found among
his mother's school books. There are a few references to popular
astronomy, but in general for Mrs. Eddy modern science does not exist
except in the most general way as the erroneous expression of error and
always with a small "s" as against the capital "S" of her own system.
Nor does she show any knowledge of other philosophic idealisms nor any
acquaintance with any solution of the problems she was facing save the
commonplaces of evangelical orthodoxy. "Science and Health" knows
nothing also of any medical science save the empirical methods of the
medical science of 1860 and 1870.

But she cannot have been wholly uninfluenced--being a woman of an alert
mind--by the controversy which, in the seventies and eighties, was
raging about a pretty crass and literal materialism, and her writings
probably reflect--with a good deal of indirection--that controversy.
Here is a possible key to a good many things which are otherwise
puzzling enough. She is, in her own fashion, the defender of an
idealistic interpretation of reality and experience. Now all idealistic
systems have had to dispose of matte