160 The Fundamentals of what is known as “expectant attention,” says: “There is scarcely a malady in which amendment has not been produced by practices which can have had no other effect than to direct the attention of the sufferer to the parts, and to keep alive his confident expectation of a cure.” But, as everybody knows, this method of operation will not cure diseased tissues, set broken bones, or heal structural derangement. Neither will it cure a toothache permanently, as the follow ers of Mrs. Eddy themselves prove by their patronage of the dentist. When one discovers, as I have more than once, a de vout follower of Mrs. Eddy resting uneasily in a dentist’s chair, he naturally asks himself if the nerves in the teeth are the only nerves that can cause pain? Some years ago Mrs. Eddy herself had a tooth removed under local anaesthesia. I t caused her theories to be held up to ridicule in a good many quarters. In her reply she gave out this ingenious explanation: that the dentist’s belief in the means he employed was a mental force which combined with her own—exerted in a different direction—and produced a painless operation as a logical, mathematical “ resultant of forces ” (Brooklyn Eagle Library, 1901). Eddyism, therefore, denies evident facts, and claims for facts what universal experience proves to be false. Its ad vocates themselves give the lie to their creed every day of their lives by treating their bodies as if they were real. They eat and drink, and with the change of seasons they change the weight of their apparel. Mrs. Eddy declares that “Man has a sensationless body” (p. 280, “Science and Health ). But yet “one should not tarry in the storm i f the body is freezing (p. 329, “Science and Health” ). Why not? If the body is “sensationless,” it will not be affected in the least by the de grees of Fahrenheit, either up or down. Anyway, Mrs. Eddy insists that there is neither heat nor cold. “Heat and cold are products of mind.”
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