● ● ● exceedingly fine, silken thread, and her thoughts run closely on the borders of refined and highly sublimated transcendentalism which ordinary thinkers fail to comprehend. . . . Having been cured of a disease by Dr. Quimby, she alluded in the course of her remarks to the nature of the ills flesh is heir to, an[d] endeavored to explain the cause of such diseases upon metaphysical, physiological and philosophical principles, but she reasoned so high above the ordinary plane upon which we stand that we failed to comprehend her full meaning. We understood her, howeve[r], to say that in most cures “disease is an error of the spirit, and it only needs Truth to combat it.”116
Mrs. Patterson was exploring her way forward with a mixture of confidence and uncertainty. The historian who attempts to follow her progress through this ambiguous period has the advantage of drawing on the known facts of her future development for retrospective insights. Without these he might well lose himself and his subject in the inconclusive and frequently contradictory evidence of the period itself.
The preceding two decades of American life had been marked by a blind pushing and striving toward the great philosophical issues. A sort of frontier democracy of the mind encouraged all who would to tackle the age-old riddles. With utmost confidence but with obvious ignorance of the problems involved in what he was saying, an Andrew Jackson Davis could write:
God is positive, all else is negative. If there exists an Evil principle, would not that principle be an integral element in the constitution of the Divine Mind? If there exists any where, in the realms of infinitude, an empire of sin, misery, and endless wretchedness—“a lake of fire prepared for the Devil and his angels”—would not God be also there? God is all-in-all;—would he not, therefore, be in the evil principle? God is omnipresent;—would he not, therefore, be as much in Hell as in the regions of the sinless and blessed? There is no principle, antagonistic to God; no empire at war with Heaven! it can not ● ● ●
116 “Monday, January 11, 1864,” unidentified publication, clipped in Mary Baker Patterson, scrapbook, c. 11 January 1864, SB001A, p. 13, MBEL.