negative side only. One could not correct the errors in a mathematical calculation without first understanding the rules governing numbers. Some people think they can learn how to be healthy by studying disease; but they get further and further into disease when they study it as an entity. The study of health as a real principle involved in the being of man leads to the discovery of its foundation--mental harmony.
4. In metaphysics the beginning students insist upon having evil explained to them--how it originated, and why it has place in existence--when good is the origin of all that is. They worry and they play their thoughts upon this question until in sheer desperation they, as a rule, give it up. The tangle of a good God and a bad Devil will not straighten itself out from their plane of perception. The trouble is that they do not know enough about the good. They want to know all about the evil without first being acquainted with the positive side of the question. They are like children who know nothing about the harmony of music, yet insist upon a full explanation of discords before they will go on with their lessons. To know about evil we must first become thoroughly familiar with good.
5. We find in our investigation of the character and the place of death that by studying death alone we can get no clue that will lead us to even a single fact. It has no foundation in itself. Every definition we can frame implies that death is the absence of something, and we are forced to inquire into that which is absent before we can know the meaning of the condition that the absence seems to cause |