Quimby did not go in for such broad metaphysical considerations; his concern was more practical and psychological. His God was a wisdom to be used to correct the mental mechanism which governed the body. In one sense Quimby remained to the end of his days a clockmaker with a flair for mechanical invention. Yet he obviously yearned to raise his system into a more spiritual dimension. This was shown by the religious terminology he so often used when writing or talking about his theory, though not as a rule in his practice.

Although he had no fixed name for his philosophy,¹¹⁸ Quimby began at some point to think of it as a science and to relate it to the Christ. An even more audacious idea may have come to him through Davis, who had described the laws by which the universe is governed as constituting the Holy Ghost.¹¹⁹ Quimby, too, used this theological term to describe his “science.” Thus a theory which had risen from the swamps of mesmerism was identified with God’s promised revelation of Himself to the human heart.

Yet spiritually presumptuous as the claim may be, behind it was a groping conviction that God must reveal Himself to a scientific age through law, as principle. And if this was so, then the saving knowledge of His holy laws must come as an eternal science.

This is the conviction that Mrs. Patterson appears to have reached early in her association with Quimby.

From the outset he had been impressed by her spirituality. One of his theories was that man tended toward the animal, woman toward the spiritual: