Had he lived in a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in his practice would have now been deemed either mythical or miraculous. He seemed to reproduce the wonders of the Gospel history. But all this was only an exhibition of the force of suggestion, or the action of the law of faith, over a patient in the impressible condition.103
Since Evans himself defined the impressible condition as a magnetized state not involving sleep, he was in effect describing Quimby as a magnetic doctor at the very moment that Mrs. Glover, through her experiences with Wright and Kennedy, was making the same discovery—but with a very different response.104 The magnetism which Evans regarded with approval Mrs. Glover vigorously repudiated. To her it was the mental and moral opposite of the healing power of Christ.
She never went back on her high estimate of Quimby as a man, nor did she deny that he was an “advanced” thinker. The same thing might be said of Evans, for that matter. But in her final judgment, both were hopelessly entangled in animal magnetism. After 1872 she drew the line of demarcation with increasing sharpness. In the last edition of Science and Health she would write:
When the Science of Mind was a fresh revelation to the author, she had to impart, while teaching its grand facts, the hue of spiritual ideas from her own spiritual condition, and she had to do this orally through the meagre channel afforded by language and by her manuscript circulated among the students. As former beliefs were gradually expelled from her thought, the teaching became clearer, until finally the shadow of old errors was no longer cast upon divine Science.105
One shadow that persisted for several years was over the word “mind.” Although she had never used the word in the semi-physical ● ● ●
103 [Evans, Mental Medicine, pp. 131, 208–209, 210.]
104 Quimby himself felt that his theories separated him from magnetism as he understood it. Evans, on the other hand, saw an essential continuity between Quimby’s earlier and later practice.
105 [Eddy, Science and Health, p. 460.]