word “evil.” For him it is all a question of ignorance or error. There is neither ignorance nor error in Science, hence no sin or evil. The problem of evil differs in no way from that of disease. Therefore Quimby says nothing about repentance and regeneration. Man already is good in reality. He is Science. He becomes “a part of God” by accepting Divine wisdom as his guide. Quimby does not mean this in the sense of pantheistic submergence of individuality, but in the sense of intimate relationship with that “invisible Wisdom which never can be seen by the eye of opinion.”
If, however, Quimby's spiritual exegesis might have been fulfilled in Swedenborg's science of correspondences, we find nothing in his writings pertaining to the realms of evil spirits and angels, and nothing that tells us what for him was the content of the spiritual world. He is not at all interested in psychical experiences except so far as they imply belief in the spiritism of the day, and he opposes this because he finds it fundamentally misleading. He does not raise the question whether there is anything real behind the phenomena, for his interest is to direct attention to the world of Science or “the Christ within.” He is clairvoyant in high degree, but not as “mediums” are, not through self-surrender, but through openness to Divine guidance and intuition.
In one of his critiques of spiritualism, for example, Quimby puts to the typical spiritist the direct questions: “When I speak is it I or my spirit? If it is I, do I think also, and if I think when do I cease thinking? If I lose my organs of speech, etc. belonging to the body, where am I? Am I anything? If I am a spirit, when was I not one? How came I to be flesh and blood and then a spirit? I am either a spirit all the time or I am not, and if I am one what is the change called death, and what dies?” He goes on to say that if the spirit is not “dead” it cannot give an account of what is supposed to have happened, and if it does not “die” there is apparently no way to account for communications purporting to come from the “dead.”
He protests, therefore, against the whole notion that the spirit is the mere thing a seance would make it out to be. Our real existence or selfhood does not change. True memory persists, for it is eternal, while memory attached to this existence “belongs to the idea, matter.” Our real life is composed of light and wisdom, while matter is employed to
