To bring the nations of the earth into a more friendly fellowship, in the hope of securing permanent international peace.

One of the speakers at the World's Parliament of Religions was Swami Vivekananda. After the Parliament, he founded a movement that has placed Vedanta Societies in various cities. "The movement stresses the oneness of all religions, basing its teaching upon the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita."

Another objective of the Parliament, which met at a world's fair that boasted "the first electric railway in the world" and a Hall of Manufactures covering thirty acres, was "to indicate the impregnable foundations of Theism, and the reasons for man's faith in Immortality, and thus to unite and strengthen the forces which are adverse to a materialistic philosophy of the universe." Perhaps it was apparent that these forces were in need of greater support.

5. Naturalism

The most striking fact in the intellectual history of the last third of the nineteenth century was the blow to the historic doctrine of supernaturalism by new developments in the biological and physical sciences.

About at the end of the approximately two decades' zenith of transcendentalism came Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. This "served as the final bell to summon the defenders of opposing views . . . for the battle which was to ensue." Although

stifled for a time in the United States because it had neither an organization nor a sufficient number of enthusiastic devotees to further it, naturalism was given new life through the development of evo-lutionary concepts.

The United States was conquering a continent, and growing in wealth and population. While there were such developments as St. Louis Hegelianism, it scarcely can be denied that

the economic and social transformation of the United States which culminated in the Gilded Age was accompanied in the intellectual sphere by a new trend towards naturalism and materialism.

While "at no time did the tenets of naturalism hold uncontested sway over American thinking," the naturalistic movement was something important that had to be dealt with by those to be considered here. Their existence, at least, has been recognized in some observations that will serve to conclude this sketch.

Idealism was driven underground during the latter part of the nineteenth century, to become the peculiar property of clergymen, professors, and women. But it could not be suppressed entirely, and it broke out in bizarre or partially disciplined forms, such as New Thought or Christian Science.

CHAPTER III

FOUNDATIONS OF NEW THOUGHT

1. Western Religious Healing before New Thought

"Nothing in the evolution of human thought appears more inevitable than the idea of supernatural intervention in producing and curing disease." One finds

power over disease claimed in Egypt by the priests of Osiris and Isis, in Assyria by the priests of Gibil, in Greece by the priests of Aesculapius, and in Judea by the priests and prophets of Jahveh.

The physicians were priests, or rather the priests were physicians, for the religious aspect did not preclude the use of drugs, medicinal springs, diet, and even surgery.

The concern here is with the distinctively religious modes of healing.

There is no doubt that Christianity began with an emphasis on faith healing. Jesus healed many, and told them that their faith had made them whole. When people had no faith, He was limited in His healing activities. His cures were not miraculous in the pagan sense, however. He always connected the patient's faith with God, and bade those, whom He cured, to give thanks to the Father for His love and mercy towards them.

However, "in the first three centuries of our era the Church increasingly lost the gift of spiritual healing.

. . ." As more people became converted, or partly converted, to Christianity, the original faith became modified, as far as many understood it. "In many ways, the Church itself was captured by the paganism which it had attempted to destroy. . . ." Magic crept into the Church's healing, and superstition took the place of symbolism in the interpretation of Church practices.

Obviously, much has to be omitted from this account. After 300, "spiritual healing languished for 1500 years." However, it was not lost completely.

Saints like St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Martin Luther (1483-1546), St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), George Fox (1624-1691), John Wesley (1703-1791), Father Matthew (1790-1856), Pastor Blumhardt (1805-1880) and Father John of Cronstadt (1829-1908) were all healers .

As this list shows, healing has not been confined to the Roman Catholic Church. "Healings have taken place in connection with almost every Protestant community." Some of the most outstanding healings were those associated with an Irish Protestant, Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1683); his healings of such conditions as "grievous sores" and "cancerous knots" were authenticated by "the scientist and astronomer Flamsteed, the moralist Cudworth, and Bishops

 Patrick and Wilkins."Greatrakes is interesting no
t only as a layman in

for generations the healing touch was regarded as the property of kings. . . . The practice of the king's touch faded with the removal of the Stuart line from the British throne. . . .

After Greatrakes, "psychotherapy . . . could be dispensed by physicians and laymen as well as by kings and priests."

It has been said that

in this transposition of faith from sovereign to subject, was a nodal point in the development of faith-healing. It was a visible phase in the investment of the psychotherapist with powers accepted almost universally as the attributes of divinity.

In America, where there were less fixed lines of division of occupation and status, it may have been natural for healing to develop without much regard for the classification of those associated with it. Among religious groups with some relatively early American healing were the Shakers, Mormons, and Perfectionists. However, it was outside of organized religion that the modern religious healing movement began, or at least was given an impetus that had waned within religion, as normally recognized. It was from mesmerism that there came the stimulus that led to the religious healing.

2. Magnetism and Mesmerism

i. Introduction

Since New Thought originated in the United States, it seems unnecessary to trace the long European history of its antecedent mesmerism in detail. However, a bit of this history may be helpful.

From at least the time of Thales, in the sixth century, B.C., there was speculation on the connection of magnetism and life. It came to be believed that there was a subtle magnetic fluid uniting all people with one another and with the heavenly bodies. It was maintained that one's life could be controlled through this field.

The most famous figure in the field that came to have his name was Franz or Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). He made mesmerism fashionable and secured the attention of a French scientific committee. This group rejected the claims of a magnetic fluid, and attributed mesmeric phenomena to imagination. The importance of the production of physical effects by imagination was generally overlooked then. However, there was set up the question of fluid or imagination as the explanation of mesmerism. As the alternative name, animal magnetism, indicates, the nature of the subject was in doubt. Some upheld materialistic theories and others more idealistic ones. Recently discoveries regarding the importance of magnetism in relation to living systems and the recognition of nonmaterial fields as real in the realm of physics may leave the question unresolved, although in the twentieth century the fluid theory g enerally has been regarded as a thing of the past.

Mesmerism reached the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. This was before it received much medical recognition under the name of hypnotism. Some curative value was attributed to mesmerism, but this aspect of it was of less interest to many than the so-called higher phenomena of mesmerism; these were various parapsychological happenings brought about in connection with some mesmerized subjects. These phenomena included, it was reported, mind reading, sharing in the sensations of ot her people, seeing distant places or seeing through opaque materials wherever located, and, as part of this, diagnosing illnesses and prescribing remedies for them.

When Charles Poyen St. Sauveur came from France to the United States in the 1830's and spread the knowledge of mesmerism, various people took up the practice of mesmerism and speculated on its nature. Perhaps because philosophical idealism had not recovered from the Enlightenment and because most mesmerizers probably had no very great knowledge of philosophy of any sort, the theory that a fluid was sent between operator and subject was the most popular view. Most speculation seemed to be a matter of variation on this theme. Perhaps because Franklin's electrical experimentation had gained widespread recognition, little-understood electricity was offered as a characterization of the nature of the fluid. Poyen was one who turned to electricity as this fluid after a consideration of mesmerism or animal magnetism. In his defense of the fluid, finding no "loss of any sensible matter" from the body when one sometimes becomes weakened, he suggests that there has been a loss of a

substance, extremely subtile and nice, a fluid, running over all his body intimately and deeply connected with his organs--a fluid that can be accumulated or lost through peculiar circumstances.

After considering animals that are known to generate electricity, he concludes "that the nervous agent is of the same nature as the electric fluid."

ii. John Bovee Dods

A man who followed in this train of thought was John Bovee Dods (originally Beaufils) (1795-1872). Probably he did not exert any significant influence on the development of New Thought, but Quimby knew of him and Dresser took note of his views. His importance in this study is found in his concluding that there is an intermediate something between mind and matter; this something he called electricity. The reason for its importance here is its impressing Dresser as reasonable. While Dods produced a system that was essentially materialistic, it struck Dresser favorably because of its emphasis on the importance of mind, as conceived by Dods, in the scheme. This reaction of Dresser shows his commonsensical attitude, which finally could not accept the identity of thought and existence, which became the position of Evans, who is to be considered after taking note of Quimby.

The fundamental observation of the Dods philosophy is that not all things are self-moving. Matter without the power of self-motion is on all sides. The explanation of movement is ultimately to be found in something called mind or spirit, which by definition is self-moving. This seems to be dualism. However, he rejects "the immateriality of the spirit, because that which is positively and absolutely immaterial" cannot have form and occupy space, an inconceivable situation for Dods, who mai ntains that

to talk of a thing having existence, which, at the same time has no form, nor occupies space, is the most consummate nonsense. Hence an immateriality is a nonentity--a blank nothing."

Yet form seems to have some sort of reality for Dods apart from its embodiment; he regards mind as "living and embodied form."

Dods calls electricity an "emanation of God,"and also says that it is "co-eternal with spirit or mind,"

and "slumbered in the deep bosom of chaos."

The existence of God is argued on the basis of "motion and the absolute perfection of the chain of elementary substances." Each progressively lighter sort of matter is "nearer motion than its grosser neighbor." Electricity is simply the something that is so rarified that it can be moved by mind. If mind is material, electricity is just the second highest form of matter. Both mind and electricity are imponderable, invisible, and coeternal. However, electricity provides such valuable clues to the nature of God and the problems of evil and freedom that it may deserve special stress.

If mind make use of electricity as its agent, then it must possess the voluntary and involuntary powers to meet the positive and negative forces in electricity. If this be not so, then the Infinite Mind cannot be the Creator and Governor of the universe; because it is by his voluntary power that he creates a universe, but it is by his involuntary power that he sustains and governs it. If the voluntary power of the Creator governed the universe, then no possible contingencies could happen--and noth ing once commenced could ever perish prematurely.

Dods calls electricity "primeval and eternal matter." He also says that

substances, in their infinite variety, pay a visit to time, assume visible forms, so as to manifest their intrinsic beauties for a moment to the eye of the beholder, and then step back into eternity, and resume their native invisibility in their own immortality.

However, his eternity apparently is not timelessness, for, without reference to Kant, he says:

There must be something eternal. God, duration, and space exist of philosophical necessity, and . . . space was eternally filled with primeval matter. When I say that they exist of necessity, I mean that the contrary of space and duration cannot possibly be conceived.

Matter would not be if it had not always been.

Electricity

is the body of God. All other bodies are therefore emanations from his body, and all other spirits are emanations from his spirit. Hence all things are of God. He has poured himself throughout all his works.

But "gross, inert matter cannot be transmuted into mind--cannot possibly secrete mind."

Creation out of nothing is impossible. The Hebrew word translated as create means "to gather together by concretion, or to form by consolidation."

The Eternal Mind is not absolutely omnipresent, while his electrical body is because it pervades immensity of space.

Although made of electricity, the world differs from it. "Electricity, being the uncreated substance, is the positive force, and the globe, being the created substance, is the negative force."

The body of man is but an outshoot or manifestation of his mind. If I may be indulged the expression, it is the ultimate of his mind. Hence every creature in existence has a body which is the shape of its mind, admitting that the physical laws of the system were not interrupted in producing the natural form of the body from mind.

"All feeling is in the mind." The corresponding spiritual limb is the seat of the feeling experienced in relation to an amputated physical limb.

Mind resides in the brain, not all through the body; otherwise we should lose part of it with amputations, which seems inconsistent with the explanation just offered for feelings of amputated limbs; also separate parts of the body would think. It is through the medulla oblongata that sensation comes, and it is there that "the royal monarch sits enthroned." The cerebrum and cerebellum are "two distinct brains," dealing, respectively, with voluntary and involuntary nerves and powers. Half of the body's el ectricity (or nervous fluid or galvanism, for he means the same by them) operates through the arteries and voluntary nerves and half operates through the veins and involuntary nerves. The circulation of blood is magnetic, rather than hydraulic.

"The one grand proximate cause of disease [is] the disturbing of the nervous fluid, or throwing the electricity of the system out of balance." This throwing out of balance can be done by either physical or mental impressions.

Here enters the great value of Electrical Psychology, which is "the doctrine of mental and physical impressions to cure the sick." Dods distinguishes it from mesmerism by saying that although they use the same nervous fluid, mesmerism is the doctrine of sympathy, in which magnetizer and subject are brought into such perfect sympathy that they see, hear, and feel what the magnetizer sees, hears, and feels, and there is somnambulism, which he identifies with mesmerism, whereas in the electro-psychological s tate one retains his senses and will and remembers what happens.

Whatever the cause of a disease, "mind can, by its impressions, cause the nervous fluid to cure it, or at least to produce upon it a salutary influence," provided there be no organic destruction.

"Medicine produces a physical impression on the system, but never heals a disease."

The sanative power is in the individual, and not in the medicine. Medicines and mental impressions only call that sanative principle to the right spot in the system so as to enable it to do its work.

The electro-nervous fluid is able to heal for the following reason: "If all things were made out of electricity then it is certain that electricity contains all the healing properties of all things in being."

Dods seems to want the best of all methods, and to be less than fully concerned with consistency of opposing means. He proposes to combine all healing methods into a grand Curopathy.

Dods does indeed point toward later developments that constitute New Thought. He and it are alike in emphasizing the power of mind and in rejecting unconscious hypnotic influence, in favor of conscious redirection of thought. However, New Thought, to the extent that one can generalize about a broad group of writers, and Dods part company where he maintains a dualism of spirit and matter, or even a position of making spirit a form of matter, although his position on this seems unclear. His emphasis on the details by which operations of the body are carried on also is foreign to New Thought. His attempt to reason out the existence of God is uncommon to New Thought, in which this is a point normally taken for granted.