166 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



Scientists stand alone among the sects that have 

 won material and propagandist successes among 

 Anglo-Saxon people. Consistent in their belief that 

 the control of the mind over the body is absolute, 

 they ignore the existence of well-defined and even 

 irremediable disease. The undoubted successes 

 which they gain in hysterical affections and in some 

 structural diseases in which symptoms have been 

 exaggerated by coexisting nervous disorders are 

 balanced by numerous criminal failures with organic 

 disease which might have been benefited by suitable 

 scientific medical or surgical methods, and by innu- 

 merable relapses in cases where the nervous factor 

 has been unimportant as compared with the definite 

 existing nutritional disease. The establishment of 

 so pretentious, ignorant, and dangerous a sect is 

 possible only in a country in which biological culture 

 is low, and the people are ready to be bamboozled 

 by every kind of political, sociological, and medical 

 charlatanry. 



The Emmanuel Church movement represents far 

 less dangerous and pretentious tendencies, though 

 many of its assumptions are unscientific and anti- 

 biological. Many of its doctrines are vague ; it 

 fails to recognize the difficulty of distinguishing 

 between functional and organic disease ; it invokes 

 the unproved claims of telepathy in order to explain 

 the effect of prayer on the mind of God, and it 

 assumes that the " subconscious mind" (or sub- 

 attentive consciousness) "has more direct control 



