Very early Mrs. Patterson seems to have drawn a distinction between the psychic and the spiritual, as T. S. Eliot did when, referring to the psychic interests which W. B. Yeats introduced into his poetry, he complained that Yeats was concerned with the wrong supernatural world. If Mrs. Patterson retained her faith in an orthodox heaven where she would be reunited with those she had loved and lost, this was a supernaturalism which at least ruled out occult gossip with departed spirits in some psychic half-world, earth-bound and dream-burdened.
In her scrapbook is an entry, “Written in bed April 24th 1857,” which reads: “Mother waits for me in the far beyond! and through the discipline, the darkness and the trials of life, I am walking unto her. She has walked the still road that leads from the sepulchre to the seraphim,” with more of the same.61 This is the language of orthodox Christian yearning, not of spiritism. The communication with her mother for which she evidently longed was to be found through a spiritually disciplined life leading to a brighter hereafter rather than through the interposition of a medium, a spirit control, and all the rest.
With her active mind it was inevitable that she should give some thought to what lay behind these spiritistic phenomena, but she would not find a rational answer that would completely explain them—or such part of them as could not be written off as fraud—until she discovered Christian Science. Then she would devote a full chapter of Science and Health to the subject, a chapter first entitled “Imposition and Demonstration” and later “Christian Science versus Spiritualism.”
It is useful to remember the thorough grounding she had had in the teaching that any pretended revelation must be subject to testing by reason. Locke and Watts, not to mention Albert Baker, had armed her against undue credulity. One of the schoolbooks which had influenced her most was Whately’s Elements of Logic, and Whately had made some thought-provoking distinctions in his chapter “On the Discovery of Truth”:
There . . . are two kinds of “New Truth” and of “Discovery. . . .” First, such Truths as were, before they were discovered, absolutely unknown. . . . Such are all matters of fact strictly so called, when first ● ● ●