In 1845–46, in New York City, he gave a singular series of lectures on “The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind” while in the trance state. The next year they were published in book form with the same title and had a wide influence on many— including, apparently, Quimby.
At the outset the book declared, “Fear not, for Error is mortal and can not live, and Truth is immortal and can not die!” It went on to explain with oracular authority, “Truth is a positive principle: Error is a negative principle; and as truth is positive and eternal, it must subdue error, which is only temporal and artificial.”35 This was the eighteenth-century faith which had found expression in the dissertations of Albert Baker. But truth and error have meant many things to many men, and to Davis they were linked with strange cosmological speculations:
In the beginning, the Univercœlum was one boundless, undefinable, and unimaginable ocean of liquid fire! . . . It was without bounds—inconceivable—and with qualities and essences incomprehensible. This was the original condition of Matter. It was without forms; for it was but one Form. It had not motions, but it was an eternity of Motion. It was without parts; for it was a Whole. Particles did not exist; but the Whole was one Particle. There were not Suns, but it was one Eternal Sun. . . .
Matter and Power were existing as a Whole, inseparable. The Matter contained the substance to produce all suns, all worlds, and systems of worlds, throughout the immensity of space. It contained ● ● ●
35 [Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (New York: S. S. Lyon and Wm. Fishbough, 1847), pp. 1, 16.] The Physician, volume one of Davis’s four-volume work The Great Harmonia, appeared in 1850 when Quimby’s thinking was in an early formative stage. Davis writes:
Remember that diseased organs or parts are simply evidences that the spiritual equilibrium has been constitutionally or generally disturbed. Consequently, this spiritual disturbance is the disease, and not the multifarious and momentarily changing symptoms which are locally experienced. Hence to restore scrofulous, tuberculous, or cancerous matter to its proper position in the animal economy, the original spiritual harmony must be re-established. And here the question may be asked—“How can you re-establish this original harmony?” I answer, the spiritual principle must be addressed by, or reached through, the same mediums which it employs, as instrumentalities, in operating upon and governing the organism. I have shown these mediums to be electricity and magnetism. (pp. 116–117)