Mrs. Eddy Purloins from Hegel: Newly Discovered Source Reveals Amazing Plagiarisms in Science and Health
Haushalter, Walter M. Mrs. Eddy Purloins from Hegel: Newly Discovered Source Reveals Amazing Plagiarisms in Science and Health. Boston: A.A. Beauchamp, 1936.
Before Conrad Moehlman’s scholarly 1955 rebuttal of Haushalter’s accusations of plagiarism against Mary Baker Eddy was published, Haushalter’s 1936 book had garnered a great deal of publicity. His charge that Eddy lifted Hegelian theology and established her chief doctrinal points in Science and Health from Hegel stems from a complicated (undocumented) tale of secret passage through one of Eddy’s early students, Hiram S. Crafts. Haushalter claims that Crafts, once a Kantian Transcendentalist, had received a letter personally addressed to him from Dr. Lieber (who had connections to Hegel) along with a valuable document, “The Metaphysical Religion of Hegel.” Haushalter relied on the mysterious letter (purported to have been traced back to Hegel) and this document to argue his case. Haushalter finds Eddy’s plagiarizing use of this document increasingly scattered through Eddy’s later editions of Science and Health due to her “peculiar trick of shuffling the cards anew with each passing year” (29). He acknowledges the tradition of attributing Phineas P. Quimby as the source of Science and Health seems more likely than for the “Olympian metaphysics of Hegelianism … [to be found in] the muddy, nondescript systemless philosophy of Science and Health” (49). But he concluded that her appropriation of Hegelianism “would be shaped by the confines of her own peculiar mind” (55).
See also annotations:
Ordeal by Concordance: Historian Explodes the Lieber Myth by Conrad Moehlman
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