Later in Science and Health she would define “evening” in part as “mistiness of mortal thought,” and “morning” as “revelation and progress.”⁵⁰ Quimby had defined mind itself as a mist or vapor, and the metaphor is not inappropriate to his hazy amalgam of idealism and materialism. But the logic of Mrs. Patterson’s new-found conviction of Spirit’s allness compelled her to look for authority in another direction. Using the editorial “we” that was to mark her writings for some years to come, she now announced unequivocally, “Our only text book for the Science of man is the bible.”⁵¹

Many years later she wrote that despite the stimulus of the Quimby period she had lacked “the one thing needed” until the experience of “the accident and injury called fatal and the Bible healed me and from Quimbyism to the Bible was like turning from Leviticus to St. John.” Then, her account continued, she dropped forever the belief that the human mind healed disease and gained the great discovery “that God is the only healer and healing Principle and this Principle is divine not human.”⁵²

The birth of a radically new idea is something that requires more than cursory examination.

Loren Eiseley, in Darwin’s Century, has said that all the most diverse and seemingly unrelated phenomena of that period can be seen in perspective to be revolving “in a moment of seeming heterogeneity before they crystallize into a new pattern with Darwinism at the center."⁵³ The tendency to pull religious phenomena into this pattern has proved irresistible. There is no spontaneous generation of ideas, it is  ● ● ●