For all its empirical background, English philosophical idealism remained as theoretical as did the later German varieties. Even French positivism was concerned with systems more than with facts. Tocqueville at this time was observing that in Europe men confined themselves to “the arrogant and sterile research of abstract truths; whilst the social condition and the institutions of democracy prepare them to seek immediate and useful practical results of the sciences.”⁹⁴ Time would amply disclose the danger that lay in both extremes, but the English utilitarian influence and its essential American outcome in pragmatism at least opened the way for philosophy to relate itself more directly to practical life.

There was little in Mary Baker’s education that would ordinarily be thought of as practical, but there was little in her character that would allow ideas to remain abstract and unrelated to daily life. She might well have agreed with Keats, “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.”⁹⁵  The very word “demonstration,” in Christian Science, was to signify a practical proof rather than a logical argument.

Yet reason and logic were important, immensely important, to one who was to think of Christianity as Science, to see all evil as error, and to relate practical results to metaphysical premises on the basis of Jesus’ words: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”⁹⁶

The practical, workaday world lay all around, and beyond it lay the great world of public affairs. Albert Baker was for Mary the link between the two, together with the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette.

This fiercely Democratic weekly newspaper, edited for many years by the powerful Isaac Hill, was read religiously by the entire Baker family. Isaac Hill, known as the Democratic dictator of New Hampshire, was a member of Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet,” and the Patriot was therefore  ● ● ●