who went this road long before Mrs. Eddy
and who thought it through with a searching subtleness of which she was
incapable, reached the only logical conclusion. All experience is
illusion, entire detachment from action is the only wisdom, and
absorption in an unconscious something which only escapes being nothing
is our appointed destiny:

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of,
And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

_Sense-Testimony Cannot Be Accepted for Health and Denied for Sickness_

Christian Science, then, is not monism, it is rather a dualism; it
confronts not one but two ranges of reality and it is compelled to admit
the existence of the reality which it denies, even the fact of denying
it, for it is a philosophical axiom that what we deny exists for us--we
could not otherwise deny it. Denial is the recognition of reality just
as much as affirmation. To repeat, it is this continuous interwoven
process of trying to reconcile the one-sided idealism of Christian
Science with the necessity of its argument and the facts of life which
gives to "Science and Health" what one may call its strangely bifocal
character, though indeed this is a somewhat misleading figure. One has
the same experience in reading the book that one has in trying to read
through glasses which are out of focus; you are always just seeing and
just missing because Mrs. Eddy herself is always just seeing and just
missing a really great truth.

This fundamental inconsistency penetrates the whole system even down to
its practical applications. Christian Science denies the testimony of
the senses as to sickness and yet accepts them as to health. It goes
further than this, it accepts the testimony of the senses of other
people--physicians, for example, in accepting their diagnosis. The
edition of "Science and Health" published in 1918 offers in chapter
eighteen a hundred pages of testimonials sent in by those who have in
various ways been helped by their faith. These letters are shot through
and through with a recognition of the testimony of the senses which no
explanation can possibly explain away. "I was afflicted with a fibroid
tumour which weighed not less than fifty pounds, attended by a
continuous hemorrhage for eleven years." If the senses have any language
at all, this is their language. A growth cannot be known as a fibroid
tumour without sense testimony, nor its weight estimated without