● ● ● strong that it was like the birth of a new understanding and seemed to open to them a new heaven and a new earth.18
Sibyl Wilbur, who talked to many of these same students, gives a vivid picture of the scene:
The students who were drawn together were workers; their hands were stained with the leather and tools of the day’s occupation; their narrow lives had been cramped mentally and physically. . . . They could not come to Mrs. Glover in the daytime, for their days were full of toil. At night, then, these first classes met, and it was in the heat of July and August. In the barely furnished upper chamber a lamp was burning which added somewhat to the heat and threw weird shadows over the faces gathered round a plain deal table. Insects buzzed at the windows, and from the common over the way the hum of the careless and free, loosed from the shops into the park, invaded the quiet of the room. Yet that quiet was permeated by the voice of a teacher at whose words the hearts of those workmen burned within them.19
The extraordinary thing was that they were engaged in the study of metaphysics.
As a philosophical discipline, metaphysics shines with such great names as Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Averroës, Kant and Hegel, but in the later nineteenth century it was already beginning to fall into the discredit which fully overtook it half a century later. The age was distinguished by what one writer calls “antimetaphysical minds of the first order in every field of investigation.”20 About 1870 a loosely named Metaphysical Club was formed in Cambridge, not far from Lynn, by Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, Chauncey Wright, and the junior Oliver Wendell Holmes; here were the seeds of that pragmatic philosophy which accorded so well with the emphasis of the new age ● ● ●
18 Milmine, Life, p. 156 [bracketed text Peel’s].
19 Sibyl Wilbur, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1929), pp. 189–190.
20 Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 106. Wiener cites as examples: Maxwell, Tyndall, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Lister, Claude Bernard, Koch, Helmholtz, Hertz, Kirchhoff, Mach, Stallo, Gibbs, and Darwin.