Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to header Skip to footer
The Years of Discovery
Portland: 1862 | page 219

● ● ●  the qualities to produce all things that are existing upon each of these worlds. The Power contained Wisdom and Goodness,—Justice, Mercy, and Truth. It contained the original and essential Principle that is displayed throughout immensity of space, controlling worlds and systems of worlds, and producing Motion, Life, Sensation, and Intelligence.36

This is typical of those bold, ignorant, imaginative ventures into what might be called scientific mythology in which the nineteenth century abounded. Poe was to do the same sort of thing in his Eureka the next year.37 And just as Poe wrote of electricity as the “strictly spiritual principle” to which all vitality, consciousness, and thought must be attributed, so Davis used the language of idealism to express a basic materialism.38 His two co-eternal principles—mind and matter, or Father-God and Mother-Nature as he was later to call them—really gave matter the primacy even when he seemed to deny it.

He could write in the vein of Agassiz:

The Thoughts of the infinite Mind . . . constitute the laws of Nature. . . . Nature . . . is merely a Thought of the divine Mind, as forms are the thoughts of Nature. . . .

 . . . It is perfectly clear that nothing is, and nothing can be, but the Divine Mind, which is the Cause, and the Universe, which is the Effect.39

But elsewhere he explained, “All ultimates, to me, are still matter; but to you they are spirit.” And again, “It is a law of Matter to produce its ultimate, Mind.”40

Here is the probable source of Quimby’s description of mind as “spiritual matter.” Logical consistency is not to be looked for in any of   ● ● ●

36 Davis, Principles of Nature, pp. 121–122.

37 Davis and Poe were both especially concerned with the beginning and the end of things, with genesis and apocalypse. See Perry Miller, “The End of the World,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 217–239.

38 [Edgar A. Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1848), p. 37.]

39 [Davis, Principles of Nature, pp. 326, 508.]

40 [Davis, Principles of Nature, pp. 47, 50.]