New Thought

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New Thought is the loose American metaphysical movement, emerging in the later nineteenth century, that holds the mind to be the decisive cause of health, well-being, and material circumstance — and so makes the disciplined direction of thought into a method for changing one’s life. It is less a single church than a family of teachers, healers, and small organizations sharing a few convictions and a great deal of vocabulary. At its center sits a single conviction worked into a hundred idioms: that mind, or Spirit, is the one reality and the active cause, that the human mind partakes of that same divine nature, and that conditions of the body and of the world answer to the thoughts held within. From this seed grew a literature, a cluster of churches, and a vernacular of self-transformation that would outlast every organization that carried it.

The Maine fountainhead

Its acknowledged source is Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), born at Lebanon, New Hampshire, and settled at Belfast, Maine — a clockmaker by trade who became a mesmerist in the 1840s. The technique he learned descended from Franz Anton Mesmer’s doctrine of an invisible “animal magnetism,” carried into New England by the French lecturer Charles Poyen in the mid-1830s. Quimby toured with a gifted trance subject, Lucius Burkmar, whose clairvoyant diagnoses appeared to track the patient’s prior belief rather than any independent perception of the body. That observation turned Quimby away from the magnetic theory altogether. By the later 1840s he had set aside the trance apparatus for a quieter account: disease, he came to argue, is at bottom an error of belief, a wrong thought the patient has accepted as true, and cure consists in correcting that thought. He treated thousands at Portland between 1859 and his death in 1866, and left a manuscript corpus that circulated privately for half a century before Horatio Dresser edited it into print as The Quimby Manuscripts in 1921.

From the healer’s couch in Portland two lines descended, and the difference between them defines the movement. One ran through his former patient Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), whom Quimby treated between 1862 and 1865. After his death, and after the fall on the ice she dated as her own moment of discovery, Eddy built Christian Science into a strictly governed church with its own textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875), chartered in Massachusetts in 1879 and reorganized as the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1892. The question of how much Eddy owed to Quimby’s manuscripts has been contested since Julius Dresser’s indictment of 1887; her biographer Gillian Gill calls it the single most controversial issue of Eddy’s life. The careful reading finds clear debts of vocabulary alongside a synthesis that is substantially Eddy’s own — a Christianized absolute idealism in which matter is simple illusion, in which a “malicious animal magnetism” can work harm at a distance, and in which her own teaching stood as a unique and final revelation rather than one current among many. That closure is exactly what separates Christian Science from the line that became New Thought.

For the other line stayed diffuse and deliberately open. It took the name New Thought — a current rather than an institution, carried by lecturers, by cheap and widely sold books, and by a loose federation that became the International New Thought Alliance, organized in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Where Eddy fixed her doctrine and policed it, New Thought absorbed: Hindu, Hermetic, and Swedenborgian terms entered its vocabulary as they reached an American readership, and no one held the authority to expel a heresy because there was no creed from which to depart.

The first theorist and the teacher of teachers

The movement’s first systematic theorist was Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889), a Methodist minister who had crossed into the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem before visiting Quimby around 1863. Evans framed the mind-cure in a philosophical vocabulary it would keep: Berkeley’s idealism, Emanuel Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences between the spiritual and natural worlds, and a quietist devotional strain. His Mental Cure (1869) and Mental Medicine (1872) gave the practice its earliest book-length articulation. Revisionist scholarship notes that Evans’s surviving journals never mention Quimby and that his framework was largely in place before any Portland visit — a reminder that the movement’s clean lineage from a single fountainhead is partly its own retrospective tidying.

If Quimby was the source and Evans the first theorist, Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925) was the great diffuser — the figure through whom the movement became a movement. Eddy’s student and the editor of the Christian Science Journal in 1884–1885, Hopkins broke with Eddy late in 1885 and relocated to Chicago, where in 1888 she restructured her teaching as the Christian Science Theological Seminary. It was, by most accounts, the first modern institution to ordain women as ministers in any number; the great majority of her early graduates were women. Her epithet — “teacher of teachers” — is literal. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore studied with her; so did the founders of Divine Science; so, later and privately, did Ernest Holmes. Through Hopkins the mind-cure passed from a healing technique into a teaching lineage with churches at its end. Gail Harley’s study restored her from the long neglect that left the men she trained better remembered than the woman who trained them.

The institutional churches

From Hopkins’s seminary radiate the three durable institutional inheritors of New Thought. The Fillmores — Charles (1854–1948) and Myrtle (1845–1931) — founded Unity in Kansas City in 1889, after Myrtle’s recovery from tuberculosis, which she attributed to the new teaching, and the couple’s study with Hopkins. Unity grew into one of the two largest bodies in the movement, with its campus at Unity Village, its round-the-clock Silent Unity prayer ministry, and the long-running daily devotional Daily Word. Its foundational reading was not by a Fillmore at all but by H. Emilie Cady, a New York homeopathic physician whose Lessons in Truth (serialized 1894–95, bound 1903) became Unity’s catechism in all but name. Divine Science, the second church, was built in Denver by Nona Brooks (1861–1945) together with Malinda Cramer of San Francisco, whose parallel stream converged with Brooks’s in 1889; the First Divine Science Church of Denver opened on the first day of 1899, with Brooks as its pastor. Cramer died of injuries from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the movement’s center settled permanently in Denver.

The third church carried the movement’s most ambitious philosophy. Ernest Holmes (1887–1960), Maine-born and Los Angeles-settled, took private classes with Hopkins in New York in the early 1920s and founded the Institute of Religious Science in 1927; its magazine, Science of Mind, has run continuously since that year, and the institution survives as today’s Centers for Spiritual Living. Holmes’s The Science of Mind (1926) is the most systematic single statement the movement produced — an attempt to organize the mind-cure into a coherent metaphysics he called Religious Science. His chief philosophical debt was not to the American line at all but to the British judge Thomas Troward (1847–1916), whose Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904) supplied Holmes with his architecture of a universal creative Mind that the individual mind, by impressing it with a definite idea, sets to work. The text is held in the Library here.

These women-led foundings are not incidental to the history. Hopkins, Brooks, Cramer, Cady, Annie Rix Militz, and Florence Scovel Shinn together make up one of the most prominent female religious-leadership cohorts in any American current of the period — a point Beryl Satter set at the center of her account, which reads the movement’s early decades through the way disenfranchised middle-class women used a metaphysics of mind to claim a public, healing, and governing role otherwise closed to them.

The teaching

What the writings teach is a working monism. Mind, or Spirit, is the one reality; matter and circumstance are its expression; and the human mind, being of the same nature as the divine, can call conditions into being by holding the right thoughts. Quimby’s own compression of it — that the trouble is in the mind, the body merely the house the mind dwells in — became the movement’s first principle, and its later Alliance would distill the whole into the claim that people, through the constructive use of their minds, can attain freedom, power, health, prosperity, and all good. The indwelling divine is the hinge of the doctrine: God is not a sovereign apart from the world but a presence and a power within each person, so that to direct one’s thought rightly is to align with, and to wield, a creative force that is one’s own deepest nature.

Within this frame, sickness and want are not brute facts of an indifferent world but errors that have hardened into appearance. If Mind is the one reality and good its native condition, then disease and poverty are negations — shadows cast by a mistaken belief, with no substance of their own once the belief is withdrawn. Evil, on this reading, is not a power to be fought on its own terms but an absence to be dissolved by the affirmation of the present good; the teaching shares this much of its grammar with the older Gnostic intuition that the soul’s bondage is at root a condition of ignorance, undone by knowledge rather than by combat. The cure, correspondingly, is never coercion of matter but correction of consciousness.

From this follow the movement’s two practical promises — healing and prosperity — and its characteristic techniques. Affirmation sets a chosen truth before the mind as already accomplished; denial empties the mind of the false belief that holds the unwanted condition in place; the silent treatment turns thought toward another’s healing; visualization holds the desired condition vivid until it impresses the creative Mind. The architecture is consistent across the schools even where the vocabulary differs: a recognition of the one divine Mind, an identification of the self with it, and a definite mental act by which the general creative power is given a particular form to realize. By the early twentieth century these had a slogan: what later writers named the law of attraction — the claim, given its first book-length statement in William Walker Atkinson’s Thought Vibration (1906), that like attracts like in the mental world, and that a held thought draws its material counterpart. The popular formula above them all is the title James Allen took from the Book of Proverbs, As a Man Thinketh (1903) — the most reprinted single text the movement ever produced, and the plainest statement of its creed: that a person is, outwardly and at last, what he inwardly and habitually thinks.

Where Christian Science fixed its doctrine, New Thought stayed deliberately open, absorbing Hindu and Hermetic terms as they reached an American readership. The Kybalion of 1908, presenting “the Hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece,” belongs to this milieu rather than to any ancient one; the same Atkinson who wrote Thought Vibration is the consensus author behind its anonymous “Three Initiates,” and its seven “principles” restate the movement’s mental monism in a Hermetic costume, ascribed to the legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus rather than to the Chicago lawyer who in fact composed them. Atkinson likewise authored, under the invented Indian guru “Yogi Ramacharaka,” a whole shelf of Vedanta-flavored manuals that carried South Asian vocabulary into American esoteric publishing under a fabricated authority — one of the channels by which the movement’s vocabulary swelled without its center ever shifting.

Roots and neighbors

The movement drew on company older than itself. From the Transcendentalists, and above all from Ralph Waldo Emerson, it took an idiom of the divine soul present in every person and of an over-arching Mind in which the individual participates; Emerson is quoted across the whole New Thought canon, the literary ancestor it most readily claimed. From Swedenborg came the architecture of correspondence, the world as the legible expression of spiritual cause, transmitted directly through Evans. From mesmerism came the founding practice and the conviction that an unseen power flows between minds — though the movement, like Quimby before it, dropped the physical fluid and kept only the mental effect.

Its closest sibling is Spiritualism, which grew from the same mesmeric soil after 1848 but turned toward mediumship, the séance, and evidence of survival after death; New Thought left the dead alone and trained its attention on the living mind’s power over present conditions. With Theosophy it shared a metaphysically curious American readership and a magpie vocabulary, while differing in source and temper — Theosophy reached toward claimed Eastern masters and an initiatory secrecy, New Thought toward a vernacular, Protestant-inflected, market-friendly optimism anyone could buy in a railway bookstall. With Christian Science it shared a parent and a founding insight, and parted over everything institutional: creed, governance, the status of matter, and the claim to final revelation.

The long reach

Historians of religion treat New Thought as a major channel by which an optimistic, mind-over-matter metaphysics entered American popular culture, visible afterward in self-help, positive thinking, and the prosperity gospel. The line is traceable. The popular-text wing — Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite (1897), Allen (1903), Atkinson (from 1900), Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich (1910), Charles Haanel’s Master Key System (1916), Shinn (from 1925) — ran alongside the churches and outsold them. From it Napoleon Hill drew the prosperity register of The Law of Success (1928) and Think and Grow Rich (1937), whose founding story — a twenty-year project commissioned by Andrew Carnegie in 1908 — has no documentary support; the line runs on through Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) to Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006), which Byrne credits directly to reading Wattles. The contemporary genre of “manifestation” across social media is the latest layer of the same arc, with Atkinson’s century-old phrase, the law of attraction, still at its center. This downstream commercial milieu — prosperity preaching, positive thinking, the law-of-attraction self-help trade — is itself a distinct phenomenon with its own life.

The lineage that the movement’s own writers claimed — an unbroken wisdom running back through Hermes and the East — is, on the evidence, mostly a modern construction, the period’s own reading of older material in its own terms. The resemblances it pointed to are genuine and worth tracing; they are not the descent it supposed. What is beyond dispute is the reach. A body of ideas first worked out around a healer’s couch in Maine became one of the most durable strands in how Americans came to talk about the mind — and, through the prosperity register that grew from it, one of the most commercially potent religious exports the country ever produced.

Scholarship and primary texts

The historiographic touchstone is Catherine L. Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (Yale University Press, 2007), which sets New Thought within a longer “metaphysical religion” stream running through American culture from colonial-era correspondences to the contemporary spiritual-but-not-religious (yalebooks.yale.edu). Beryl Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (University of California Press, 1999) supplies the gender history and recovers the moral seriousness of the movement’s early decades (ucpress.edu). Gail M. Harley’s Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought (Syracuse University Press, 2002) is the only book-length scholarly biography of the movement’s pivotal teacher (press.syr.edu). John S. Haller Jr.’s The History of New Thought: From Mind Cure to Positive Thinking and the Prosperity Gospel (Swedenborg Foundation, 2012) traces the arc with particular attention to the Swedenborgian thread (swedenborg.com). Charles S. Braden’s older Spirits in Rebellion (Southern Methodist University Press, 1963) remains the foundational narrative survey, and Mitch Horowitz’s One Simple Idea (Crown, 2014) treats the twentieth-century popular reception, Napoleon Hill included, with critical sympathy. The movement’s own internal history — Horatio Dresser’s A History of the New Thought Movement (1919) — is itself a primary document, committed to the Quimby-as-fountainhead reading the later scholarship has qualified.

Several of the movement’s primary texts are held in full. Troward’s Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904), the philosophical anchor of Religious Science, is at the Library; Allen’s As a Man Thinketh (1903), its most reprinted text, at the Library; Atkinson’s Thought Vibration (1906), the first book-length law-of-attraction statement, at the Library; Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich (1910), the proximate source of The Secret, at the Library; and The Kybalion (1908), the Hermetic-costumed restatement of the doctrine, at the Library.

→ In the library: Allen — As a Man Thinketh (1903) · The Kybalion (1908) · Troward — The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904) · Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich (1910) · Atkinson — Thought Vibration (1906)

→ Related: Theosophy · Hermes Trismegistus · Gnosis · Christian Science · Spiritualism · Mesmerism Animal Magnetism · Emmanuel Swedenborg · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Law Of Attraction Culture