Talk:Healing

August Comte (2009)

Recognized the importance of health and healing noting that "ancient theocracies" health and healing were an important part of human spirituality. He notes that this "natural order of things" was lost along the way and his "positive religion" is intended to restore that.

In the ancient theocracies, the most complete and most durable form of the supernatural regime, this groundless division did not exist. In them the art of preserving health and of curing diseases was always a mere adjunct of the priestly functions. Such is really the natural order of things. Positivism comes forward to restore it and to consolidate it ; and it does so by virtue of the completeness which characterizes it. The art of man and the science of man are each of them inseparable from the other; they have a common destination, though the object they have in view may present itself under different aspects. But it is not, therefore, divisible; on the contrary, aU its parts are intimately connected. No sound treatment of either body or mind is possible, now that the physician and the priest make an exclusive study, the one of the physical, the other of the moral nature of man—not to speak of the philosopher, who, in our modern anarchy, wrests fi'om the priesthood the domain of the intellect, leaving it only the heart.

The diseases of the brain, besides many others, daily prove the powerlessness of all medical treatment which limits itself to the lowest organs. It is quite as easy to see the inadequacy of every priesthood which aims at guiding the soul, and does not take into account its subordination to the body (Comte, 2009: 49)/