Warren Felt Evans

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Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) was an American clergyman and mental healer, remembered as the earliest writer to set out, book after book, the idea that the mind heals the body — the conviction from which the New Thought movement grew. He published the first of his works before the more famous organizers of that movement had written anything, and the line from his pages to the later literature of mental and spiritual healing is direct. Charles Fillmore, who would build the Unity church a generation later, called him the recording angel of metaphysics — the one who set the doctrine down on paper while it was still being lived.

From a Vermont parsonage to the New Church

Evans was born on December 23, 1817, in Rockingham, Vermont, into the New England Methodist world he would serve and then leave. He entered Middlebury College in 1837 and transferred to Dartmouth the following year, departing before he finished to take up the Methodist ministry. For roughly two decades he held appointments across New England — an itinerant preacher in the connectional system, moving from charge to charge as the conference assigned him.

A restlessness ran beneath the appointments. Even in his Methodist years Evans was a reader of the interior tradition: the Oberlin perfectionism then current in revivalist circles, with its promise that the believer might reach an entire sanctification of the heart in this life, and behind it the older French Quietism of Madame Guyon and Archbishop Fénelon, with their counsel of a will surrendered into God and a contemplation emptied of self-effort. Guyon in particular he returned to for decades; her prayer of quiet, in which the soul ceases its own striving so that the divine may act in it, supplied the devotional key he would never abandon. By his own later account he had also, around 1840, embraced the idealism of George Berkeley — the argument that the so-called material world has no existence apart from mind, that to be is to be perceived, and that what we call matter is a stable language spoken into the soul. To these he added a warm regard for the German idealists who had pressed the same intuition further, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, in whom the self and the world alike are forms of a single spiritual activity. These were not the ordinary furniture of a circuit preacher’s study, and they pointed away from the pulpit he occupied.

The figure who gave them a system was Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish savant whose visionary theology Evans took up seriously in the early 1850s. Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences holds that every object and process in nature is the exact sensible expression of a spiritual reality — that the visible cosmos is, in its entirety, the legible script of an invisible one, not by metaphor but by structural law. Coupled to it is the doctrine of influx: life does not originate in the creature but flows in continually from the divine, the Lord, into the soul that receives it. A third Swedenborgian teaching mattered to Evans as much as these: the doctrine of use, which holds that love made actual in service — useful work in the human community — is the very substance of the regenerate life rather than its ornament. Health, in such a scheme, is the body’s share in a soul rightly ordered toward use and rightly open to the influx; sickness, the sign of an obstruction somewhere in that descent of life. For a man already persuaded by Berkeley that mind is the ground of things, Swedenborg supplied the architecture — a whole graded universe, three heavens and the world of spirits, in which the inner state is cause and the bodily, outward condition is effect.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose doctrines of correspondences and influx gave Evans his metaphysical framework; portrait by Per Krafft the Elder, 1766 (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1864 Evans formalized the turn, leaving the Methodists for the Church of the New Jerusalem, the Swedenborgian body, and was received into it at Boston. The New Church was itself a young and small communion in America — Swedenborg had founded no church and discouraged the idea, and the organized body had grown up only after his death from the London circle around the printer Robert Hindmarsh — so that in joining it Evans was attaching himself not to an establishment but to a reading public bound loosely into congregations. The move into the organized New Church gave his developing convictions an institutional home, though not for long the only one, and not the home in which his life’s work would finally be done.

Quimby, Portland, and the question of the source

The traditional account of how Evans became a healer turns on a single visit. Chronically ill in the early 1860s, he is said to have traveled to Portland, Maine, to consult Phineas Parkhurst Quimby — a Belfast clockmaker who had begun as a practitioner of animal magnetism, the healing current descended from Franz Anton Mesmer, and had since abandoned the trance for what he called a silent method. Quimby held that disease was at bottom a mistaken belief lodged in the patient’s mind, and that the cure lay in displacing the false conviction with a true one. In the received story, Evans came around 1863, recovered, judged the method sound, and went home to become the first of Quimby’s patients to put the teaching into print — Quimby’s first systematizer, the man who turned a healer’s bedside technique into a written metaphysics.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), the Portland mental healer whose method the received account places at the source of Evans’s work; frontispiece portrait from The Quimby Manuscripts (1921) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

That account, repeated through the movement’s own historians, is now contested, and the contest is worth stating exactly rather than resolving. The revisionist case rests on the documentary record of Evans’s own hand. Catherine Albanese’s critical edition of his spiritual journals, covering the years 1850 to 1865 and published by Indiana University Press in 2017, records the names that fed his inner life — Guyon, Thomas à Kempis, Swedenborg, the idealists — and does not once mention Quimby. Keith McNeil’s A Story Untold (2016) reaches a kindred conclusion from the wider archive of the Quimby–Christian Science controversy. On this reading Evans arrived at his Berkeleian, Swedenborgian, Quietist framework before any Portland visit, so that whatever he took from Quimby was confirmation and method, not the seed of the doctrine itself. The two positions are best held side by side: the older lineage histories, committed to Quimby as the fountainhead, place Evans downstream of Portland; the journal-based scholarship finds the metaphysics already in place and the clockmaker absent from the record. The sources do not settle which weighting is right, and the honest report keeps both registers visible — the tradition’s memory of a healing visit, and the notebooks that do not corroborate it.

What set him apart: the books

Whatever the precise debt, one fact is not in dispute: where Quimby left mostly private manuscripts that would not be published until 1921, Evans wrote, and published, and kept publishing. His first book, The Mental Cure, appeared in 1869 — three years after Quimby’s death and six before Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health — and is reckoned the first book of the New Thought current to reach print. Its full title announced the program in the manner of the age: an illustration of the influence of the mind on the body, in health and disease, and the psychological method of treatment. There followed a connected series, each volume extending the last: Mental Medicine (1872), Soul and Body (1876), The Divine Law of Cure (1881), The Primitive Mind-Cure (1885), and Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (1886).

Across them Evans braided several inheritances into a single working metaphysics. From Quimby — or from the Portland method as it reached him — came the practical claim that disease answers to belief and that the physician’s task is to alter the patient’s mind. From Swedenborg came the doctrine of correspondences and influx, which let Evans read every bodily symptom as the outward sign of an interior, spiritual state, and every cure as the restoration of a right inflowing from the divine. From Berkeley, and from the German idealists he admired, came the underwriting argument that mind is the ground of the seeming material world, so that to heal the thought is not to trick the body but to act on the true substance of which the body is the appearance. And from the Quietists came the devotional tone — the cure framed not merely as a technique but as a surrender into union with God. In the later volumes, particularly The Primitive Mind-Cure and Esoteric Christianity, he reached outward again, drawing in Eastern and esoteric vocabulary — the language of an inner Christ, of correspondences between Western and Asian wisdom — that would mark much of the movement after him. Healing the body, in his hands, was always the near edge of a larger claim: that the human being is joined to a divine mind, and that drawing consciously on that union is at once cure and salvation.

George Berkeley (1685–1753), whose idealist argument that mind is the ground of the seeming material world underwrote Evans’s claim that to heal the thought is to act on the body’s true substance; portrait by John Smibert, 1727 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What the books described, and what Evans practiced, can be set out in its architecture without becoming a manual. The healer’s work, as he understood it, was first diagnostic in an inward sense: to discern the false belief or the disordered affection standing behind the bodily complaint, the obstruction in the inflowing life. It was then corrective — to bring the patient’s mind into contact with the true conviction, the awareness of the soul’s union with the divine mind, so that the right state might reestablish itself and the body follow. The means leaned on the silent, sympathetic concentration that Quimby had taught and that Evans recast in Swedenborgian and devotional terms: less a trick worked on the body than a turning of the whole person back toward the source of life. Because the metaphysics made every disease ultimately a spiritual condition, the cure and the cure of souls were, for Evans, finally the same act — which is why his last titles speak of an esoteric Christianity and a divine law rather than a therapy.

The practice followed the doctrine. Evans and his wife opened an establishment in Boston, where for some twenty years they treated patients by the mental method and informally taught it to those who came; Boston in those decades was the busy crossroads of the American metaphysical trade, its publishers and lecture halls carrying Spiritualist, Swedenborgian, and mind-cure currents in overlapping streams, and Evans worked in the thick of it without ever organizing a body of his own. Later he and his wife removed to Salisbury, on the Massachusetts coast near the New Hampshire line, where Evans kept a small sanitarium to which people came for rest and healing until his death there on September 4, 1889.

Theorist without a church

Scholarship places Evans at the head of the mind-cure current rather than at its institutional center, and the distinction is the heart of his significance. He founded no church. He ordained no successors and gathered no following to speak of; the Salisbury sanitarium was a healing house, not a seminary, and it did not outlive him as an institution. The movement that took organized shape in the 1880s and after — under the New Thought name, through the Chicago seminary of Emma Curtis Hopkins and the churches that radiated from it, and in the separate, more tightly governed trajectory of Christian Science — owed its later form to other hands entirely.

Yet historians of American religion credit him, with near unanimity, as the current’s first real theorist: the writer who turned a healer’s technique into a metaphysics and gave the movement its earliest body of doctrine, complete and in print, before there was a movement to receive it. His relation to the wider American metaphysical ferment of the century was real but oblique. He shared the Mesmerist substrate with the Spiritualists, yet pursued cure rather than communication with the dead; he drew, like the Transcendentalists, on Swedenborg and on the idealist conviction that nature is spirit made visible — Ralph Waldo Emerson had read the same Swedenborg and reached his own correspondences — but Evans bent the inheritance toward the sickbed, where Emerson never went. The Swedenborgian thread in particular runs through him into the later churches: the conviction that the visible answers to the invisible, that life flows in from above, that to change the inner state is to change the world it casts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who read the same Swedenborg and reached his own doctrine of correspondences but, unlike Evans, never bent the inheritance toward the sickbed; photograph by Southworth & Hawes, ca. 1857 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His name faded as louder voices carried the ideas forward, and the faded name is itself part of the record — the founder who organized nothing tends to be remembered last. But much of what those later voices carried was already there on the page, worked out in six quiet volumes by a former Methodist preacher in a seacoast town, set down before the movement had a name.

Texts, editions, and the scholarship

Evans’s own books are the primary record, and all six are in the public domain; the early ones in particular — The Mental Cure (Boston: H. H. & T. W. Carter, 1869) and Mental Medicine (Boston: Carter & Pettee, 1872) — were issued in part through the Spiritualist publishing world of Boston’s Banner of Light, which marks how porous the boundary then was between mind-cure and the wider metaphysical trade. Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (Boston: H. H. Carter & Karrick, 1886) closes the series. The decisive recent edition of the primary material is Catherine L. Albanese’s The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans: From Methodism to Mind Cure (Indiana University Press, 2017), which transcribes and annotates the 1850–1865 notebooks and is the documentary basis for the revisionist reading of his origins.

For the man in his setting, the fullest scholarly portrait is David T. Schmit’s study, Warren Felt Evans: 19th-century mystic, wounded healer, and seminal theorist-practitioner of mind cure, in History of Psychology 21, no. 3 (2018), pages 187–207, which draws on the unpublished journals to treat his own chronic illness and his turn to the Quietist mystics and Swedenborg as formative rather than incidental — the wounded healer of the title. The wider current is mapped in Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007), the standard historiography of American metaphysical religion; in J. Stillson Judah’s older The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America (1967); and, with particular attention to the line running through Evans, in John S. Haller Jr.’s The History of New Thought (Swedenborg Foundation, 2012), which foregrounds the Swedenborgian inheritance. Horatio Dresser’s A History of the New Thought Movement (1919) is the foundational movement-internal narrative and the chief carrier of the Quimby-as-fountainhead account against which the later edition-based scholarship reacts — invaluable as primary testimony, partisan as history. The World Religions and Spirituality Project’s survey of New Thought situates Evans within the movement’s full arc for the general reader. The first port of entry, though, remains The Mental Cure of 1869 itself, still in print in modern reprints and freely available in its original Boston editions: a former preacher’s first attempt to write down, plainly and at length, what he took to be the law by which thought governs flesh.

→ In the library: Allen — As a Man Thinketh (1903), a later New Thought work · Troward — The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904)

→ Related: New Thought American Metaphysical Religion · Emmanuel Swedenborg · Swedenborgianism New Church · Christian Science · Mesmerism Animal Magnetism · Franz Anton Mesmer · Spiritualism · Ralph Waldo Emerson