In these early books there is nothing about healing, but in 1869 appeared The Mental-Cure dealing with the subject that now occupied Evans to the exclusion of all else. It started again with “the spiritual science of Swedenborg” and with a Swedenborgian use of such terms as “Life,” “Love,” “Truth,” and “Mind” for God, but it quickly got down to the practical business of healing.⁵

No mention is made of Quimby anywhere in the book. In fact Evans writes of himself: “The author had but little in works on mental or physiological science to guide him in his investigations, but was under the necessity of following the light of his own researches, experiments, and intuitions.” But Quimby’s ideas are all there in different language, as Horatio Dresser noted. Man has a natural body and a spiritual body, the latter described as a “nerve-projected form.” Evans, unlike Quimby, has no objection to the word “magnetism,” and he writes, “Magnetic manipulations act upon this department of our being [the spiritual body], and go to the root of all diseased action. . . . In clairvoyance, somnambulism, and the trance, . . . the subject becomes invested . . . with the powers and perceptions of the spirit-life.”⁶

Throughout the book Evans extols the “superior value of the magnetic, or, more properly, the psychological method of treatment” in which “mind acts upon mind,” though usually with the assistance of the hands, for the vital force is “poured forth from the palms of the hands more copiously than from any other part of the body.” There are, he writes, “a variety of phenomena, passing under the names of Mesmerism, Psychology, Biology, Animal Magnetism, Pathetism, Hypnotism, and even Psychometry, that are reducible to one general principle,—the influence or action of mind upon mind, and the communication of spiritual life from one person to another, who is negatively receptive of it.”⁷

Like Quimby and other magnetic healers he gave absent treatments: “This spirito-magnetic influence can be transmitted independently of spatial distance. We have experimented with it at a distance of over a thousand miles, and once between New Hampshire and Louisiana.”