Experience Not Reliable
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As I have before stated, you, my sister, rely upon experience. Your
experience decides you to pursue a certain course. But that which
many term experience is not experience at all; it is simply habit, or
mere indulgence, blindly and frequently ignorantly followed, with
a firm, set determination, and without intelligent thought or inquiry
relative to the laws at work in the accomplishment of the result.
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Real experience is a variety of careful experiments made with the
mind freed from prejudice and uncontrolled by previously established
opinions and habits. The results are marked with careful solicitude
and an anxious desire to learn, to improve, and to reform on every
habit that is not in harmony with physical and moral laws. The idea
of others’ gainsaying what you have learned by experience seems
to you to be folly and even cruelty itself. But there are more errors
received and firmly retained from false ideas of experience than from
any other cause, for the reason that what is generally termed experience
is not experience at all; because there has never been a fair trial by
actual experiment and thorough investigation, with a knowledge of the
principle involved in the action.
Your experience was shown to me as not reliable, because opposed
to natural law. It is in conflict with the unchangeable principles of
nature. Superstition, my dear sister, arising from a diseased imagina-
tion, arrays you in conflict with science and principle. Which shall
be yielded? Your strong prejudices and very set ideas in regard to
what course is best to be pursued relative to yourself have long held
you from good. I have understood your case for years, but have felt
incompetent to present the matter in so clear a manner that you could
see and comprehend it, and put to a practical use the light given you.
There are many invalids today who will ever remain so because
they cannot be convinced that their experience is not reliable. The
brain is the capital of the body, the seat of all the nervous forces and of
mental action. The nerves proceeding from the brain control the body.
By the brain nerves, mental impressions are conveyed to all the nerves
of the body as by telegraph wires; and they control the vital action of
every part of the system. All the organs of motion are governed by the
communications they receive from the brain.
If your mind is impressed and fixed that a bath will injure you,
the mental impression is communicated to all the nerves of the body.
The nerves control the circulation of the blood; therefore the blood
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