204 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



evidence is given for an innervation sense, it can only be the kinesthetic 

 sensations that result from one's movement, and never the movement 

 itself, that one experiences ; hence, to reduce consciousness to movement 

 would be to reduce all sensations to kinesthetic sensations; (&) because 

 the field of consciousness is infinitely too rich a manifold to be put in 

 one to one correspondence with any system of mere motions, internal or 

 external, 



Mr. Riley said in abstract: Prom recent investigations made by Pro- 

 fessor Joseph Jastrow comparing the results of the Federal Census of 

 1910 with the number of advertised Christian Science practitioners, there 

 is shown a three-fold distribution of the sect, chiefly in three pairs of 

 states: Massachusetts and New York, Illinois and Missouri, Colorado and 

 California. Here the pathological factor is first in evidence, for the 

 centers of influence are large cities, with their concomitant nervous dis- 

 orders, and the health resorts of the mountains and coast. A second 

 factor is that of free thought, or a liberal attitude toward the uncon- 

 ventional such as is found in the given states, with their large cities 

 and their great number of imported foreign faiths. A third factor is 

 financial, a reaction from overmuch material prosperity and a leaning 

 towards a somewhat ascetic immaterialism. This leads to the final 

 factor, the previous idealisms which prepared the soil, such as New 

 England transcendentalism, with the Emersonian call to the "demon- 

 stration" of the "spiritual principle," and the German idealism repre- 

 sented in the St. Louis School. These four factors apply not only to the 

 followers of Christian Science, but to the founder; and here Eddyism 

 may be considered not only an afterclap of transcendentalism, but a 

 recrudescence of Neoplatonism. As in Eome and Alexandria, so in 

 America, there has arisen a demand for knowledge dependent on "divine" 

 communications ; a denial of sensible existence ; a contempt for reason 

 and physical science, and a destruction of the distinction between sensible 

 and intelligible. In all this, Christian Science shows itself a recurrent 

 phase of the larger movement of so-called New Thought, with its oc- 

 cultism, gnosticism and mysticism. The type of mind to which the 

 movement appeals is complex — practical and yet uncritical, non-academic 

 and yet speculative. Such a mind fails to distinguish the fundamental 

 fallacy of Christian Science — that while it disclaims materialism, it 

 still reeks with material terms such as "mental offshoots," "gravitation 

 Godward," and the "aroma of Spirit." In fine, the "divine metaphysics" 

 bolsters itself up with the latest physical discoveries, such as Hertzian 

 waves and X-rays, to explain "absent treatment" and silent "demon- 

 stration." 



