Some will say, but if we undertake to do this will have to accept the world of God as historical, as relating to the beginning, because there is no other going so far back. There is no harm in reasoning from that and I hope you will so accept it, not only as history, but as divine revelation, not that I wish to quote from or refer to it, because I never do so in my teaching. If we look upon syphilis we will see that man’s own act leads him to the place where he comes in contact with syphilis; it is the result of action.
Syphilis is that disease which corresponds to the effect impure coition, of going where syphilis is, of coming in contact with those who have it. It is an action; it is not so with psora. Man does not seek it, he does not go where it is, he does not associate with those necessarily that have it. He may be exposed; but syphilis is the result of his own action, which is an impure formication or adulteration which he knows better than to seek, and knows enough from his intelligence to avoid. Syphilis, then. is a result of action, although after once ultimated it may be perpetuated by accident. There is always a state and condition of man that precedes his action, and if syphilis corresponds to man’s action; and there is a state prior to it, a diseased condition that precedes, that state must correspond to the which precedes action, which is thinking and willing.
Thinking and willing established a state in man that identifies the condition he is in. As long as man continued to think that which was true and held that which was good to the neighbor, that which was uprightness and justice, so long man remained upon the earth free from the susceptibility to disease, because that was the state in which he was created. So long as he remained in that state and preserved his integrity he was not susceptible to disease and he gave forth no aura that could cause contagion; but when man began to will the things that were the outcome of his false thinking then he entered a state which was the perfect correspondence of his interior. As are will and understanding, so will be the external of man.
As the life of man or as the will of man, so is the body of man, and as the two make one in this world, there is evolved from him an aura which is vicious in proportion to his departure from virtue and justice into evils. And long before the time of Noah’s flood, which was an inundation that destroyed the evils ones that were upon the earth at that time, there was a manifestation, called leprosy, which was but the result of the dreadful profanity that took place in this period.
A great many people suffered then from the violent aura of leprosy, whereas the natural disorder of the human race today is a milder form of psora upon a different race of people. If we had the same race upon the earth today we would have leprosy among them, as we now have the milder form of psora. The ancients referred to leprosy as an internal itch.
Hence this state, the state of the human mind and the state of human body, is a state of susceptibility to disease from willing evils, from thinking that which is false and making life one continuous heredity of false things, and so this form of disease, psora, is but an outward manifestation of that which is prior in man. It was not due to actions of the body, as we find syphilis and sycosis to be, but due to an influx from a state, which progressed and established itself upon the earth, until we can see it as but the outward manifestations of man’s very nature.
The human race today walking the face of the earth is but little better than a moral leper. Such is the state of the human mind at the present day. To put it another way, everyone is psoric. We know what leprosy means, and to say that the whole world is in a state of psora is no broader or narrower than to say that leprosy prevails today upon the face of the earth, but it prevails in a milder form, in the face of the earth, but it prevails in a milder form, in the form of psora.
A new contagion comes with every child. As Psora piles up generation after generation, century after century the susceptibility to it increases. This true of every miasm and true of all drugs. We find in the drugged world that those who have been mercurized become more susceptible to Mercury and are more easily poisoned by it. Those poisoned with Rhus are so sensitive to it that they cannot go within a whiff of it; those have been poisoned in their earliest beginning with psora become more sensitive to it, so that in childhood the slightest whiff of from their school friends will bring on a crop of vesicles between the fingers attended with the acarus.
Of course, some persons will say that the acarus is prior to the eruption, but they don’t know that a healthy person will not be affected by the acarus. The miasm is simply evolved out of a state and the acarus is in turn its ultimate. It is the state is prior, the itching is not prior. The human race becomes increasingly sensitive generation after generation to this internal state, and this internal state is the underlying cause which predisposes man to syphilis. If he had not psora he could not take syphilis; there would be no ground in his economy upon which it would thrive and develop.
The will and the understanding are prior to man’s action. This is fundamental. The man does not do until he wills; he wills what he carries out. If man did what he did not will, he would be only an automation. He wills to go to a house of prostitution, or seeks for a prostitute with whom to copulate, and from her he takes the syphilitic miasm. This action of his will and this disease corresponds to the man. There is a state in which he thinks it only, in which he wills, but in which he is not yet arrived at the state in which he can act. First there was the thinking of falses and willing of evils, thinking such falses as led to deprived living and long for what not one’s own, until finally action prevailed. The miasms which succeeded psora were but the outward representations of actions, which have grown out of thinking and willing.
Psora is the oldest outward expression of the disease of the human race representing this vital beginning, and next exists that state that corresponds to action. Thinking, willing and acting are the three things that make up science of the life of the human race. Man thinks, he wills and he acts. Now, that aura which is given out from the human race at any period of its history is that which corresponds to the state of the human race. The children inherit it from their parents and carry it on and continue it. As the internal is so is the external, and the external cannot be except as the result of the internal.
The internal state of man is prior to that which surrounds him; therefore, environment is not cause; it is only, as it were, a sounding board; it only reacts upon and reflects the internal. One who has the prior, which is internal, may have that which can follow upon the external; it flows, as it were from the internal and effects its forms upon the skin, upon the organs, upon the body of man. Such is influx and the in flowing is always in the direction of the least or no resistance; so that it is in the direction of man’s affections, man’s loves.
Things flow in the direction he wants them to flow. Diseases correspond to man’s affections, and the diseases that are upon the human race today are but the outward expression of man’s interiors, and it is true if the diseases are such they represent the internal forces of man. Man hates his neighbour, he is willing to violate every commandment; such is the state of man today. This state is represented in man’s diseases. All diseases upon the earth, acute and chronic, are representations of man’s internals. Otherwise he could not be susceptible, or could develop that which is within him. The image of his own interior self comes out in disease.
This state continued to progress, and it has accumulated and become complex. The original simple psora has added to it syphilis and sycosis, and these progress and have now effected a state, they have continued to effect a state in mankind, whereby the race is so susceptible to acute that many of our citizens have every little thing that comes along, and every little epidemic of influenza brings them down with an acute attack. This could not be but for the complications that a man has caused himself to get into, or has taken upon himself.
This was not done in one generation, but has been accumulating upon the face of the earth so long as we have a history of man. Otherwise man would not be sick, for he should be a perfect animal nature. Look at the perfection or all things put upon the earth; see the plaints, how perfect they are; but man by his thinking evils and willing falses has entered upon a state wherein he has lost his freedom, his internal order, and is undergoing changes which the animal kingdom in its period, and the vegetable kingdom in its period, did not take on.
In 1881, Kent accepted a position as professor of anatomy at the Homeopathic College of Missouri, an institution with which he remained affiliated until 1888. In 1890, Kent moved to Pennsylvania to take a position as Dean of Professors at the Post-Graduate Homeopathic Medical School of Philadelphia. In 1897 Kent published his magnum opus, Repertory of the Homœopathic Materia Medica. Kent moved to Chicago in 1903, where he taught at Hahnemann Medical College.