H. L. Mencken wrote in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1913) regarding the philosopher’s radical vegetarianism and belief in “natural methods of healing”:
Nietzsche had read Emerson in his youth, and those Emersonian seeds which have come to full flower in the United States as the so-called New Thought movement – with Christian Science, osteopathy, mental telepathy, occultism, pseudo-psychology and that grand lodge of credulous comiques, the Society for Psychical Research, as its final blossoms – all of this probably made its mark on the philosopher of the superman, too.
Emerson must have cast quite a shadow if Mencken’s genealogy is correct. Sergei Prokofiev was a devout Christian Scientist, a serious reader of Mary Eddy Baker’s Science and Health.