However, he also turns to Berkeley and says that Berkeley brought to notice prominently the view that matter's properties are "only sensations." This follows the assertion by Evans that "the underlying reality in what we call matter is nothing but spirit. Material things, as they are only effects, can have no independent existence."

Fortunately, it is not necessary to obtain a final view from Soul and Body. It may be taken as introductory to the next Evans book, The Divine Law of Cure, 1881.

In this work Evans returns to Berkeley and says that more than two score years before, he was converted to idealism by the attempt of Reid to refute Berkeley. He adds that Berkeley's reasoning is logically impregnable. This dating places the start of his adherence to idealism as early as his college days or the start of his ministry, before his discovery of Swedenborg. It appears that for years after turning to Swedenborg that seer's writings tended to take the place of other thinkers. But by the time of this book Evans is well back into the reading of standard philosophers. This is not to say that he abandons Swedenborg; he thinks that Swedenborg's views will help to strengthen th e growth of idealist influence, which he found then prevailing.

In introducing The Divine Law of Cure, Evans lumps Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel together and says that in his philosophy, based on theirs, the "fundamental doctrine is that to think and to exist are one and the same, and that every disease is the translation into bodily expression of a fixed idea of the mind and a morbid way of thinking." He goes on to claim no originality except in the application of idealism to healing. Although Evans here has indicated his stress on thinking, in contrast to his earlier emphasis on one's affectional nature, he proceeds to consider the nature of religion and to make it clear that religion is not merely intellectual, but calls for reunion of one's soul with God. He would attempt not to prove God's existence, but to experience it.

It is not always clear on the basis of what thought, or inspiration, Evans is writing, but sometimes he specifically says, as in the reference to Berkeley and in his statement that "Kant has clearly proved that space and time are not real entities, but subjective states, and the necessary conditions under which we conceive the existence of things external to ourselves." Sometimes his references are so general as to make it uncertain whether he is writing from knowledge obtained from original or from secon dary sources, but there are enough page references to works, especially of Fichte, Berkeley, and Hegel to make it almost certain that he must have read in their works to a considerable extent. Since his writing is more or less popular, or at least has the practical end of healing largely in view, he does not seem greatly concerned with presenting a philosophical system as such. Probably he is more concerned with offering such encouraging conclusions as the following, wit! h an a bundance of not very helpful general references:

There is truth in the old theory of an Animus Mundi, or Soul of the World, for God sustains to the material universe a relation analogous to that of mind and body in man. All of nature's action is God's action, and the uniform mode of the Divine activity and procedure is what we call a law of nature. All theological systems, and all religious philosophies, meet here and embrace,--Spinoza and Cudworth, Hegel and Schleiermacher, Berkeley and Locke, Renan and Neander, Fichte and Tholuch, Parker and Channing. They all believe, however cautiously they may express it, that nature is an apparition of the Deity,--God in a mask. This gives to this great truth, that God is the only Reality of nature, the character of an intuition, or inspiration, which means the same.

In The Divine Law of Cure, Evans presents a fascinating chapter title in "The Creative Power of Thought, or Hegel's Philosophy as a Medicine." Here Evans gives his opinion that Hegel has expressed the gospel message of John in a philosophical statement, the essence of which is that "whatever is is thought." He equates this with Berkeley's philosophy. Evans seems not to be interested in reasoning out the position, but simply sets forth a view that can be applied practically. In applying the philosophy to healing, Evans says that what is not in thought is not experienced, so cannot trouble one. This is basic to his healing method. He asserts that one can change the direction of his thinking. To switch one's attention from a difficulty is to provide relief for the time that the attention is switched. However, this is not a cure in itself. What is required is not simply to turn one's thought away from the trouble, but to turn to the height of thought that unites one with the divine healing power. This "divinely-intelligent force," which is found everywhere, is at work in healing and is given an easier job by one's conscious reception of it.

This is not essentially different from the practice advocated in the first Evans book on healing. However, there is more emphasis on thought in the present work and more emphasis on the nonintellectual side of man in the first book. Dresser in 1906 believed that all the books of Evans on healing were consistent with what Quimby would have said if he had possessed sufficient education. However, by 1919 Dresser had become more familiar with Swedenborgianism and took a disapproving view of the later Evans views, which tended to depart from the Swedenborgian emphasis on divine life-love. Dresser now considered Quimby and the earlier Evans closer to each other. For Dresser, the later Evans view placed too much weight on thought, rather than on what Dresser considered more thoroughgoing reorientation of one's whole constitution. He recognized that for Evans thought was not superficial, but Dresser considered the later Evans message inadequate for guiding others into the mos! t mean ingful understanding of the divine nature of the healing process. As will be seen in the next chapter, as Dresser progressed, he became increasingly dualistic, so it was natural that he should find the Evans movement toward monism disheartening.

It is to the last two books of Evans that one should turn to see the fullest development of his outlook, which largely coincided with what would be called New Thought. Curiously, Dresser does not take note of these two books in his account of Evans in A History of the New Thought Movement.

These books were The Primitive Mind Cure, 1884, and Esoteric Christianity, 1886. In them one finds a rich mixture of Eastern and Western thought. They represent a movement away from standard philosophy into more occult pronouncements, essentially pantheistic Evans believed that in this pantheism he found not only non-Christian Oriental thought, but also the essence of primitive Christianity. As indicated in Chapter II, Eastern thought was rather widely available in the United States late in the nineteenth century, so the extent to which Evans was responsible for its inclusion in New Thought is open to question. However, it may well be that especially before the 1890's the later writings of Evans were important sources of this sort of thought, at least for pe ople primarily concerned with healing.

It scarcely can be doubted that Evans considered his last two books important. In The Primitive Mind-Cure he says that it "is intended to take the reader up where the last volume of the author, 'The Divine Law of Cure,' leaves him, and conduct him still further along the same path of inquiry." Although the last two books published were "written in the interest of self-healing," they are essential to the appreciation of his completed philosophy. It is not strange that the theoretical and the practical should be found in the same works, for in his view they were one. In his final books Evans brings together all the strains that influenced him. He believed that they were united in original Christianity.

He says that the developing movement of mental healing was not new but simply the

reappearance under the mask of another name of one of the fundamental principles of Christianity, the doctrine of salvation by faith, using the word faith in its primitive Christian and Platonic sense of higher form of knowledge."

He goes on to observe that the cure of disease is really a matter of conversion. Obviously, this involves an act of will, but Evans adopts as adequate for bringing this about a Socratic identification of knowledge and virtue:

It was a tenet of the Platonic philosophy, that no one ever desires or chooses evil as evil, but only under the mistaken conception of it as a good. According to the laws of the mind, evil viewed as such cannot be an object of desire. All deviation from right living is the result of an error of the understanding,--a sin,--and this must be corrected. It is to be also remarked, that to correct an error in ourselves is to come into the opposite truth. If it be an error, an illusion, that I, the imm ortal Ego and real self, am sick, if the error be removed, I must believe the opposite, that I am well. If my malady is not my real self, it must be an unreal thing, a delusive appearance.

In the primitive Christian system, sin and disease are the same. Sin is the mental, and disease the physical, side of the same thing. To cure disease and to forgive sin, in the fulness of meaning given to that expression by Jesus, are identical.

Here is a religious outlook that might have pleased Dresser, but for the pantheism with which it is associated.

Evans also provides justification for his emphasis on thought in his later philosophy. It is seen to be not simply a pedestrian process of thinking, for "pure thought is the summit of our being." It is spirit and governs us. It is the point of our appearance out of the unknown. Since thought and existence are one, any change of thought changes our conditions. To think a change in the condition of one's body, rather than just to think about it, will bring about the change. Here Evans sums up the full depth of one's being in the name of thought. To be sure, this is no proof of what is claimed, but at least it is a possibility that Evans presumably believed that his healing practice conf irmed. However, he humbly confessed that he had found no method of healing always successful.

Evans continues to recognize something beyond the ordinary. While he speaks of it now in terms of intellect, rather than love, his meaning apparently remains essentially the same as it had been from his first writing on healing. Now using Platonic terminology, he writes of the necessity of receiving what he might have spoken of as divine influx:

When we turn the receptive and passive intellect towards the realm of light, the "intelligible world," the light of truth will flow in according to our degree of receptivity. . . . This turning the receptive side of our mental nature towards the world of light is, in reality, the highest and most effectual form of prayer. The passive soul, with voiceless longing and in tranquil waiting, stands in silence as flowers turn toward the sun to receive its vivifying light and heat.

He identifies this receptive nature with Plato's receptacle. Of the references in the last book, none is of greater interest than those showing that he had discovered "that remarkable book, The Perfect Way." Since he does not refer to its authors, it is probable that he did not know their identity. The book was issued anonymously in 1881. Later it appeared under the names of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, with the preface dated Christmas, 1886, which was after the publication of Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics. The Evans references to The Perfect Way link the English seeress and eclectic thinker, Anna Kingsford, with New Thought [not only through Evans, but perhaps through Malinda E. Cramer, recent research suggests, and more recently through Mildred Mann], and also show that Evans was exposed to some criticism of Swedenborg, especially if the edition read by Evans contained a footnote, to a Maitland paragraph, containing the following:!

[Swedenborg's] faculty . . . extraordinary as it was, was allied to a temperament too cold and unsympathetic to generate the enthusiasm by which alone the topmost heights of perception can be attained. Nevertheless, despite his limitations, Swedenborg was beyond question the foremost herald and initiator of the new era opening the spiritual life of Christendom, and no student of religion can dispense with a knowledge of him. Only, he must be read with much discrimination and patience.

Since Evans was more concerned with offering a practical approach to healing than with developing a philosophical system, he left no fully worked out philosophy. Perhaps his later outlook is summarized best simply by saying that he believed it to be both Christian, in the sense of primitive Christianity, and pantheistic. He moved from a Swedenborgian dualism to a view maintaining that thought and existence are one, and that thought, hence existence, is one with spirit. Thus, through thinking, one inevitably exerts some force in the only reality. Whatever its effects may be, and Evans confessed failure to apply his theory with full success, here he believed was at least the general formulation of the reason why there could be spiritual healing.

Others also encountered what they believed to be experiences to be accounted for on some rational basis. In the writings of Evans they found a possible explanation. As will be seen in the next chapter, the basic principles of Evans were given the name of New Thought. To what extent they were found in the writings of any other authors is a matter that is beyond the present inquiry. Clearly Evans was of great importance in the field, to say the very least. More significantly here, his development stands in contrast to that of the man to be considered next, Horatio W. Dresser--who moved from pantheism to dualism. [Perhaps it should be added that the dualism referred to in connection with all people associated with New Thought refers degrees of emphasis within idealistic outlooks; in none of them does it suggest a denial of dependence of both mind and matter on God.]

5. Summary

There is an ancient tradition of religious healing common to perhaps all people. One cannot well say how important this was in inspiring people to formulate what came to be known as New Thought, but it may have served at least as a general source of encouragement. A more immediately important part of the foundation for New Thought was provided by mesmerism. In this, both now usual hypnotic effects and "higher phenomena" of extrasensory perception were found. In seeking to explain mesmeric phenomena, th e old magnetic and astrological theory of an invisible fluid linking people was employed. This hypothetical fluid came to be identified with electricity, which also was thought to be a fluid.

In the "electrical psychology" of John Bovee Dods (1795-1872) electricity is held to be the connecting medium between mind and matter. All three, connected and connector, are considered matter of varying densities by Dods.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), the healer who inspired New Thought, similarly suggested a "spiritual matter" between mind and matter. However, his view is considered an idealism by Dresser, whereas the Dods outlook was materialistic.

Warren Felt Evans (1817-1889), after a career in the ministry and after study of Swedenborg, turned to Quimby and to healing. He developed Quimby's insights into an idealistic philosophy. This philosophy was largely a collection of conclusions of idealistic philosophers, rather than a direct expression of the thought of Evans himself.

The Evans philosophy, as shown in his selection of views adopted as his own, went through a process of development. He began with Swedenborgian dualism, emphasizing the affectional side of life, but moved to a view that identified thought and existence. Thought is the nature of God; God is all. Hence thought has creative power for good or ill. This view came to be known as New Thought after the death of Evans. He considered his conclusions consistent with Christianity, a "Christian Pantheism."