And of exactly the same sort is the bewilderment which falls to the lot
of the scientist who is honest and willing to face the facts. The
bio-chemist with his test tubes and his microscopes and his complex
apparatus of research sits himself down and accumulates a mass of
information about the human body. He investigates the diseases of the
body and learns in detail just how these diseases spread and sometimes
how they are caused; he can present you with a diagnosis, showing the
exact stage to which the degeneration of a certain organ has proceeded,
and perhaps he can suggest to you a change of diet or some drug which
will, for a time at least, check the process of the breakdown. But in
other cases he will be perfectly helpless; he will be, as it were,
buried under the mass of detail which he has accumulated; he will find
the vital energy depressed, and he will not know any way to renew it.
But along will come some mental specialist, who in a half hour's talk
with the patient, by a simple change in the patient's _ideas_, will
completely make over the patient's life, and set going a new vital
process which will restore the body to its former health. A religious
enthusiast may do this, a psychotherapist may do it, a moral genius may
do it; and the physician with all his learning will find himself like a
man on the outside of a house, peering in through the windows and trying
in vain to find out something about the life of the family and its
guests.
This is humiliating to the chemist and the medical man, but they have to
face it, because it is a fact. In the seat of authority over the human
body there sits a higher being which, without any religious
implications, we may call the soul; or, if it is impossible to get away
from the religious implication of that word, we will call it the
consciousness, or the personality. This master of the house of life is
in many ways dependent upon the house. If the furnace goes out he
freezes, and if the house takes fire and burns up--well, he disappears
and leaves no address. But in other ways the master of the house is
really master, and is a worker of miracles. He does things which we do
not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, but which often
completely make the house over.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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