I have tried many methods for opening the mind to receive explanatory terms, in the effort to study simple substance; to lead the material mind to the realm of immaterial mind. There is a strong tendency to depend on what is gleaned by the senses, but the realm of immaterial or simple substance must be recognized by the reason. Material substances, in the form of ordinary food, are best suited to nourish the cells of the body, to repair the waste of material cells, resulting from their normal activities. To educate the mind (inclined to receive only that which can be received through the avenues of the senses, only those reports at the sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), so as to cause it to think interiorly, requires considerable care and study.
It is necessary to transfer the mind from the concrete to the figurative to perceive something of the character of immaterial substance. Material substance is fed and treated from the plane of nutrition, but the immaterial substances are affected from the plane of disorder and cure. Some think there is as much curative substance in crude drugs as in potencies. Holloway, in his address at Kansas City last year, took his ground from Hahnemann’s position, that curative powers in drugs cannot change the affections and intellect without working in the realm of potencies.
Let us consider the light of day, the light of the Sun. We, living on the earth’s globe, rotate with it. When the side on which we live is toward the Sun we enjoy its light, but when that side is turned away from the Sun we are in darkness. People are not in the habit of thinking of the light as anything, but if it were not something it could not disappear. The Sun, from which this light emanates, is approximately ninety million miles from us, yet we receive its light. A man who weighs 140 pounds on the Earth would weigh two tons at the Sun’s margin owing to the attraction of the Sun, which is twenty-eight times as much as on the Earth. As soon as material substance comes to the Sun it is hurled into the Sun; the nearer it approaches the sun, the stronger is the velocity and attraction.
Light, however, is something proceeding from the Sun, radiating in every direction. When it reaches the Earth it is attenuated through ninety million miles, the distance between Sun and Earth. How much it is attenuated we can scarcely conceive, yet we can see things from, in, and because of light, but cannot see light itself. It is so attenuated that we cannot see it, but there is enough of it that we can see to read by it. The light of the Sun must be diametrically opposed to material substance. Material substance is drawn into the Sun, light is thrown out from the Sun. It, then, must operate by opposite laws to those that affect material substance. The Sun ceased to be material substance when transformed into light and hurled outward to the planets. If light is thus attenuated through ninety million miles, it is so great an attenuation that we can scarcely think of any greater, yet it was a simple substance at the beginning.
Nutritive substances are material; curative, substances are immaterial, simple substance. There is always a tendency to influx where simple substance is active. When there is a disturbance in the inner planes of man’s economy there is an influx, from the atmosphere, of some deleterious simple substance. If there were a curative immaterial substance, it would be drawn in by influx and act as an antidote. If remedies are given on the plane of disturbance they will cure.
Man is affected in the internals and in every cell. Every cell has all the planes. Every cell is what man is as a whole. This elevates the thought to the curative principles. Hahnemann says it is strange that medicine in the old times could not go in the opposite, way from that which it took and perceive these things.
Crude drugs produce the opposite effects from the attenuated dose. Crude whiskey, when taken into the system, produces a drunken condition; an attenuated dose makes a man who appears drunk, feel better. The primary action of a drug represents the effect of the crude drug. The effect of the attenuated dose is similar to what would be experienced long after taking the crude form. In attenuated form, primary and secondary effects, opposite effects, are found. The attraction of matter and repulsion of light account for these effects. It, may be that one of a material cast of mind may perceive that these things are true and thus the mind can be elevated to think higher than the fingers and toes.
A class of men, at present, think they discover the cause of disorder in bacteria, hence they search for pathological bacteria to be grandparents, and establish a family. Here is a material idea which indicates the trend of the Old School and all the theories they manufacture, and the trend of Homoeopathic doctors who are not Homoeopaths, believing in the bacterial etiology. If bacteria cause disease, we have many things to think about. Let us reverse the problem, and bring out things to think about in a different way. When out in the frontier country, I found the earth covered with a bed of lava from fifty to seventy-five feet in depth. The outer surface was decomposed from the influence of light, rain and heat (oxidized), forming a soil in which trees, grass and shrubs grew in abundance. Fire swept over the land and cleared it completely, destroying everything. The next season there was a vast growth of firewood (Erechthites). Immediately I said, looking at it: Did this fireweed cause the fire that spread over the woods? What a wonderful thought, brilliant idea. I was then anxious f or a body of men to tell it to. No one ever sowed the seed over that vast area where thousands of acres are spread over by the fireweed. Then I said: No, the fireweed did not cause the fire. The fireweed came from the fact that the land, burnt from the fire gave a soil, prepared by the heat, rain and air, in which these things worked a spontaneous development to cause the fireweed. What, spontaneous development? Why that idea was given up long ago. Yes, by whom? Given up long ago by SCIENCE.
Another time I was hunting in a place where the lumberers had their camps. They had cut off the woods, used the lumber, and moved off, leaving the shanties and stables and pens where their pigs were kept to rot away. Where the pigs were kept there was a copious growth of pigweed, (Cycloloma Piatyphyllum), where the cattle were kept smartweed (Polygonum Punctatum) grew in abundance, where man had deposited his fecal waste was a copious growth of nettle (Urticaceae). We do not say that the pig-weed was the cause of the pigs, that the smartweed made the cattle grow, etc. I had elevated my mind above that, and came to the conclusion that these forms of growth were the result and not the cause of the men and the cattle and the pigs.
In my own garden, on the north side of the house, in the shadow, where the ground is copiously watered, the moss has crowded out the grass. So the preparation of the soil preceded the development of any growth. Changes in the blood, when health is disturbed, make a preparation of soil in the blood for the spontaneous development in the body of various forms to correspond to every change in bodily disorders. To assume that these spontaneous growths cause the sickness is absurd.
Fluids that contain bacteria and evolve them will act as agents of infection. You can kill the bacteria with alcohol, and inject the fluid, remaining, into the body and cause a condition in the blood similar to that in the body from which the fluid was taken. The cause of the disorder is on the plane of simple substance. When it floats forth into the ultimates it evolves spontaneously into bacteria. This is direct evolution from cause to effect. You cannot become normal in soul, affections, and uses, so long as you reason from effect to cause. This trend of thought is essential to our school, to check our expenditure of millions in laboratory analysis. Blood analysis is of no use to help me to help a patient. Everyone who is seen to go deeply into bacterial study loses all love for it because it has no use. Causes are continued into effects. Germs are caused from the fluids. These fluids are infectious but the germs as living beings are not infectious. Sepsis comes first, then the germs appear. There is spontaneous development of sepsis in the blood. If the germs are left long enough they will kill off the poison. This is illustrated in the case of a cadaver. The scalpel that pricks the hand in the course of a post- mortem examination is more poisonous than the scalpel that pricks the hand after using it on the cadaver that has lain for six weeks and is mortified and green.
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.