keeps in power those demagogues. So it is with disease. Religion is despotism and in politics and disease the misery of the sick is the torment of their belief. Religion makes no compromise, it is rule or ruin. It sometimes takes to itself the name of reform, giving every man the liberty of speech, and then it subjects every one to its laws. Just so with the poor slave, or sick, for the sick are merely slaves of superstition, made so by the sins of our parents.
DISEASE[1]
What is disease? It is false reasoning. True scientific wisdom is health and happiness. False reasoning is sickness and death; and on these two modes of reasoning hang all of our happiness and misery. The question is, how can we know how to separate the one from the other? The truth cannot be changed; the false is always changing. The one is science, and the other is error, and our senses are attached to the one or the other. One is the natural development of matter or mind, and disease is one of the natural inventions of error. To show how disease is not what it is supposed to be, by those who use the word, I must show the absurdity of error's reasoning, for error is the father of disease.
We are all taught by this error to call disease something that is independent of man. To make it more plain and show where the two modes of reasoning act, I will suppose a case and take that of a young man who feeling a little disturbed calls on a physician. The physician sounds his lungs, examines his heart, and tells the patient he is very liable to have the heart-disease. The patient asks him how he got it, and is told that he is liable to catch disease and have it and to catch it is to admit that it exists independent of himself. Though the patient were dead it would exist the same and others would be liable to get it. At last the patient really has the heart-disease, which his physician described to him.
And has he created it himself, or has the doctor created it for him? Now I propose to show that he has made what the world calls heart-disease without any one's help. To show how a building is raised is to frame one and then take it down again, so I will take down this building heart-disease which this man has raised, and then you can see how ideas are made or raised. I will say to the patient, “You have built the
- ↑ Published in part in “The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby,” 1895.
