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.

Its acknowledged source is Phineas P. Quimby, a New England clockmaker and mesmerist who, in the 1850s and 1860s, came to argue that disease was a matter of mistaken belief and could be cured by correcting the patient’s mind. From his practice two lines descended. One ran through his former patient Mary Baker Eddy into Christian Science, which Eddy organized as a strictly governed church with its own scripture. The other stayed diffuse and took the name New Thought: a current rather than an institution, carried by lecturers and cheap, widely sold books. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded Unity in Kansas City in 1889; Ralph Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite (1897) sold in the hundreds of thousands; Emma Curtis Hopkins trained a generation of teachers who in turn founded further schools. The movement drew on Emerson and the Transcendentalists, on Swedenborg, and on a wider nineteenth-century enthusiasm for mesmerism and mental science.

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. From this follow the movement’s two practical promises — healing and prosperity — and its characteristic techniques of affirmation, visualization, and what later writers named the law of attraction. 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.

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 lineage that practitioners themselves claim — 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 points to are real and worth tracing; they are not the descent the movement supposed. The reach, though, is beyond dispute: a body of ideas first worked out around a healer’s couch in Maine became one of the more durable strands in how Americans came to talk about the mind.

→ In the library: Allen — As a Man Thinketh (1903) · The Kybalion (1908) · Troward — The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904)

→ Related: Theosophy · Hermes Trismegistus · Gnosis