Considering the high moral perch on which Mrs. Eddy has set herself, and contemplating the cerulean nest in which she has laid the eggs of "science," it is really painful here to study her case of fatty degeneration of the memory. For, apart from mere phraseology and acquaintance with Jahr, Dr. P. P. Quimby had reached the principle and practise of "healing scientifically," more than twenty years before she proclaimed it in _Science and Health_, and he had applied it to Mrs. Eddy herself, thirteen years prior to that publication, which descended from heaven in 1875. He did not mention "mortal mind"--by name, that is--for he called the fact of it "opinion of the natural man," in "the state of matter," and so far of "error." He did not use the term, "Immortal Mind"; for he designated it as "Wisdom," "Science," and the "Christ," as distinguished from "the man, Jesus." Adopting the Christ _principle_, Dr. Quimby aimed to follow, persistently but humbly, in the footsteps of Jesus. Dr. Quimby, in fact, was covering, both theoretically and practically, the whole true and essential field of "Christian Science," while avoiding its nonsense and its humbugs, at a time when Mrs. Eddy, as "Mary B. Glover," was a writer of love stories for "Peterson's Magazine."[28] CHAPTER V. A SOFT SET OF CRITICS. We have now learned a little of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy's celestial and terrestrial biography, as derived from the supramundane novel, _Retrospection and Introspection_, and some other sources. Bare allusion has been made to her _Science and Health_. But this, she says, "is my most important work, containing the complete statement of Christian Science." The book, as we have seen, came among men--or, more strictly speaking, among less busy women--in 1875; and a thousand copies, we are told, comprised the first edition. "The critics," Mrs. Eddy informs us, pronounced it "wholly original," but a thing that would "never be read." The foolish "critics"! How little they knew about "originality"! But they knew still less of Mrs. Eddy's "Spiritual _afflatus_," as she designates it, in the fervency of which "erudite systems of philosophy" had "melted"; nor did they realize her "divinely appointed mission"; for, in 1891, _Science and Health_ had reached sixty-two editions. "Then the critics said" that "Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or certain German philosophers," had originated Mrs. Eddy's sole and well-monopolized "Science."[29] Now if any "critics" ever did really shoot such soft intellectual putty as that, they ought certainly to have been condemned to the most heroic sort of mind-healing. Think of George Berkeley, the most acute, the most logical mind of his age, standing with both feet on John Locke's "Essay of the Human Understanding," and attempting to pull himself up into the Infinite by mouthing the shibboleth that there is no finite!