Transcendentalism--a bulky word, but covering much more than the letter of it--was naturally too high and too deep a result to get all at once into the average human head. For thirty-odd years after the close of its epoch in Germany--or until, in 1864, Dr. James Hutchison Stirling produced his _Secret of Hegel_--not a man stood on the earth adequate to reproduce transcendentalism in basis and system. But the practical gist of it, without the full center or circumference, gradually became a part of the world's literature. In Britain, most notably through Thomas Carlyle, the new light penetrated biography, history, criticism, and even political disquisition. In America, focused in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the same light, whiter and purer if less flaming and burning, both vivified and purified all things on which it was shed. There the Infinite Oversoul and the finite undersoul seemed once again to meet in communion and evolution. Meanwhile, Theodore Parker, with his vast scholarship and overpowering courage, preached Jesus of Nazareth, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Golden Rule, with little regard for any organized theology of his day, whether its Unitarianism or its Calvinistic Orthodoxy. Back of all this, as now appears, there was a plain, uncultured, but inquiring and thoughtful man, in the byways of New England, who from the mechanism of clocks turned to the workings of the human mind, and in his own way reached the depth of knowledge and the mysteries of life. From a few practical experiments, he, too, analyzed the things of matter, and found them to be re-presentations, externalizations, of elemental spirit. And then he drew the inference that spirit molds, directs, governs matter, and so that health of mind materializes health of body. But now, at once, the whole question at issue confronts us--what is the true and full position and power _of mind in therapeutics_? This question must be answered, here, not from the Quimby standpoint, and much less from that of the shallow muddle termed Christian Science, but from the standpoint of actual, accredited, established metaphysics, now substantially bearing the concensus of religion, philosophy, and the practical investigation of material phenomena.