Footnote QW73

QW73. The issue of spirit monism versus dualism remains an important religious and cultural theme.

In his (unflattering) portrait of Mary Baker Eddy, Martin Gardner writes:

The central idea of Christian Science, that Divine Mind is the sole reality, is an old one. It is found in the philosophy of ancient thinkers such as Plotinus and other Neoplatonists; in eastern religions such as Hinduism, which view the material universe as maya or illusion; and of course in the writings of idealists such as Bishop Berkeley, who called matter a "stupid, thoughtless somewhat," incapable of existing without being perceived. That matter is in some sense unreal was also a theme of New England's transcendentalist movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller.
Christian Science, however, is much more than just another form of metaphysical idealism. It also embraces the notion that sin, sickness, and death, being illusions created by false belief, can be conquered by a person's divine mind, an eternal part of God, if it learns to accept completely the nonexistence of matter with its attendant illusions of evil.

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In Science and Health (chapter 6) she compares her discovery of Christian Science to the Copernican revolution. Our senses tell us that the earth is at rest, with the heavens going around it. The Copernican revolution reversed that belief. In a similar way, Mrs. Eddy writes, Christian Science reverses the role of mind and matter. Our senses tell us that matter is real and mind is the operation of a physical brain. For Mrs. Eddy, it is the other way around. Only immortal Mind is real, and matter is an illusion fabricated by what Mrs. Eddy called "mortal mind." This is a mind that really doesn't exist because it is made of unreal matter. Kant, by the way, had earlier characterized his metaphysics, in which Mind is made central, to a Copernican revolution in the history of philosophy. That could have been where Mrs. Eddy got the metaphor.
If matter is an illusion, then our body, including our brain, must also be illusory. "Man is not matter," Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, "he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements ... man is made in the image and likeness of God.

The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy
by Martin Gardner
(Prometheus 1993)

Curiously, in the 1930s Eddy was accused of plagiarizing a German American professor's unpublished manuscript on Hegel. In Mrs. Eddy Purloins from Hegel -- Newly Discovered Source Reveals Amazing Plagiarisms in Science and Health (A.A. Beauchamp 1936), Walter M. Haushalter nails down the case that Christian Science is an American brand of Gnosticism. This Gnostic theme, which is also found in the 19th Century New Thought movement and the 20th Century New Age movement, has been found to have been a substantial component of Hegel's background and philosophy, as detailed in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Alexander Magee (Cornell 2001). (The evidence is overwhelming that Eddy incorporated, without attribution, passages from other writers into her published works.)

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