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 fireweed (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 for 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.