A. Bronson Alcott, Phineas Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy

I am surprised at the many pages of Robert Peel's Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Discovery devoted to Amos Bronson Alcott and Phineas Quimby, and their association with Mary Patterson (as Mary Baker Eddy was then). And to learn that she had quite a few exchanges with Alcott, other than the exchange she records on page 5 of Pulpit and Press. [Ed. Eddy writes that "his athletic mind, scholarly and serene, was the first to bedew my hope with a drop of humanity. When the press and pulpit cannonaded this book, he introduced himself to its author by saying, “I have come to comfort you.” (Pulpit and Press, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 5:14–18 his)]

Alcott was a noted philosopher and dreamer. His daughter Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, has recorded his impracticality as a father and provider. (He is worth a look on Google.) This period of Mary’s life could perhaps see her influencing and being influenced by the philosophers of that period.

There is quite a bit in Mrs. Eddy’s Prose Works about Phineas Quimby. More than I expected. There continue to be individuals who claim that Mrs. Eddy’s discovery was stolen from his work. The enquirer could learn the facts from what Mrs. Eddy has written, but Peel has given even more concrete evidence that Christian Science was indeed Mrs. Eddy’s own discovery.

Quimby was a symbol of Mrs. Eddy’s coming to terms with mesmerism as a would-be healing principle. Before her association with Mr. Quimby, Mrs. Eddy had practised homeopathy. She records in her textbook what she learned from it.

In last week’s Bible Lesson-Sermon ("Christian Science" – for Sunday 27^th June, 2021), we found the phrase “the next stately step.” It seems to me that what I have recorded above was a glimpse of those other stately steps Eddy took to reach the goal. The full sentence reads: "Metaphysics, as taught in Christian Science, is the next stately step beyond homœopathy" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 156:28–29).

(Maybe she didn’t consider the Alcott and Quimby phases to be stately steps!)

In the chapter The Great Discovery in her autobiographical work Retrospection and Introspection Eddy wrote: “During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon" (Retrospection and Introspection, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 24:7).” According to Peel’s Appendix A: Chronology (p. 293), that would take her back to the time of her brother Albert’s death, her marriage to George Glover and his premature death, and then her mother’s death. 

One could say perhaps that she was seeking the Science of Christianity. On page 177 Peel pops in this sentence: “There were more depths in traditional Christianity open only to experience, not to theory.” The history of her life tells us that she healed naturally, even as a child; she had actually demonstrated, so she searched for the theory or the Science of the healing.

Joyce Voysey