It is not, however, Mrs. Eddy's definition which is so remarkable, but her application of it. Having stated that matter is an illusion, she asserts that "matter cannot take cold";[5] that matter cannot "ache, swell and be inflamed";[6] that a boil cannot ache;[7] that "every law of matter or the body, supposed to govern man, is rendered null and void by the law of God".[8] _There is No Material Universe_ Quimby acknowledged the actual existence of the universe, of the physical body, and of disease; Mrs. Eddy teaches that they are all illusory. The earth, the sun, the millions of stars, says Mrs. Eddy, exist only in erring "mortal mind"; and mortal mind itself does not exist. All phenomena of nature are merely illusory expressions of this fundamental error. "The compound minerals or aggregate substances composing the earth, the relations which constituent masses hold to each other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolution of the celestial bodies, are of no real importance.... Material substances, astronomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories ... will ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of spirit." "Earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity" are merely the "vapid fury of mortal mind." "Heat and cold are products of mind"--even a "mill at work, or the action of a water wheel," is only a manifestation of "mortal mind force." Apart from mortal belief, there is no such thing as climate. "Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and powers supposed to belong to matter are constituents of mind," Mrs. Eddy says. By this she does not mean that these forces exist, for us, in our minds, but that at some time in the dim past "mortal mind" imagined matter and imagined these properties in it. Christ, she says, was able to walk upon the water and to roll away the stone of the sepulcher because he had overcome the human _belief_ in the laws of gravity. (Yet, Mrs. Eddy is continually reminding us that the fall of an apple led Newton to discover a great law, etc.) "Geology," Mrs. Eddy says, "has never explained the earth's formations. It cannot explain them." "Natural Science is not really natural or scientific, because it is deduced from the evidences of the senses." "Vertebra, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are evolved by mortal and material thought." "Theorizing about man's development from mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men, amounts to nothing in the right direction, and very much in the wrong." But it is not only with the natural sciences that Mrs. Eddy is displeased. "Human history," she says, "needs to be revised, and the _material record expunged_." Having dismissed the history of the race as trivial, the natural sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, but ingenious. _Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis_