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The Secret Science of Mind: How Positive Thinking Became a Force in the Modern World
Richard Smoley
The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
If there is a central religious doctrine for the New Age, surely it is this – the belief that positive thoughts can bend reality to their own shape. It is an alluring concept. If it’s true, we don’t need to act or work or perform in the world. All we need to do is change our thinking. But is there anything to this idea?
To understand something about the doctrine of thought power, it’s helpful to look at its history. The father of the religion of positive thinking was an obscure New Englander named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–66).
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Quimby, like many men of his time, was a jack of all trades. He started as a clockmaker, but eventually became fascinated with alternative methods of healing and learned the art of mesmerism or animal magnetism, a forerunner of hypnosis. Quimby found that if he put an assistant into a trance, the assistant could diagnose and prescribe a remedy for a patient’s disease (much like Edgar Cayce, the celebrated “sleeping prophet” who lived a couple of generations later).
Quimby built up a successful practice this way, but soon he came to a startling conclusion: it didn’t matter what remedy was prescribed; it was the faith of the patient that made the difference. So Quimby dismissed his assistant and began to practice his own radical method of healing, in which he would simply convince the patient that he or she was already well. Quimby’s warm and gentle nature aroused a sense of confidence. His office filled with patients, and many came away from his treatments feeling great relief or even fully cured. He often treated people for free when they could not pay.
A self-taught man, Quimby was not a systematic thinker. But around 1859, he began to formulate his teachings in writing. He believed he had discovered the secret of the miracles performed by Jesus Christ, and he wished to make this knowledge available to all.
“My philosophy,” he said, “will make man free and independent of all creeds and laws of man, and subject him to his own agreement, he being free from the laws of sin, sickness, and death.”
The teaching was simple. In each human being resides Truth, Wisdom, and Goodness. This is our natural birthright. But there is also another aspect: the mortal, material mind that is subject to error. And the chief error to which this material mind is subject is disease.
“Disease,” Quimby wrote, “is false reasoning. True scientific wisdom is health and happiness. False reasoning is sickness and death.” Quimby never really gave a name to his teaching, though he usually called it the “Science of Health.” Once or twice in his writings he referred to it as “Christian Science.”
Quimby attracted a number of disciples. One of them, Warren Felt Evans, was also a follower of the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). It was in fact Evans who introduced the term “New Age” in his influential 1864 book, The New Age and Its Messenger. The “messenger” of the title was Swedenborg, who in his voluminous writings proclaimed 1757 as the year of the Last Judgment. But this event, he said, did not and was not supposed to take place on earth. It was enacted in the realm of the spirits, an intermediate zone between heaven and hell. The Lord purged this realm of evil, making it possible for heaven to transmit its influences to earth in a less impeded fashion.
Swedenborg did not espouse the doctrine of thought power as it would later emerge: he held that the human mind was continually subject to influences from both heaven and hell and that the function of the human being on earth was to choose the good and renounce the evil impulses. Even so, Swedenborg’s thought, which reached the zenith of its influence in the early nineteenth century, prepared the ground for the New Age movement.
After Quimby’s death in 1866, his ideas lived on in the teachings of his most famous pupil, Mary Baker Eddy, who popularised the name “Christian Science” and created a religion around it, as well as in subsequent movements such as New Thought, Unity, and Religious Science.
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New Thought is something of a blanket term used to cover these other movements in contradistinction to Eddy’s Christian Science. The American scholar of religions Charles Braden characterised the chief differences between these two strains as follows:
1) Christian Scientists tend to be more authoritarian in their thinking, regarding Mrs. Eddy’s writings as definitive revelations, whereas adherents of New Thought stress that spiritual truths are being revealed every day;
2) Christian Scientists have tended toward denial – disease, matter, and “mortal mind” do not exist – whereas the New Thought movement has inclined more toward affirmations (“I am well”; “I am perfect”);
3) Christian Scientists are generally opposed to working with traditional physicians or allowing their patients to do so, whereas proponents of New Thought have been more flexible and pragmatic on this count.1
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Ernest Holmes’ Religious Science
One of the more vibrant strains of New Thought in the twentieth century was Religious Science, founded by Ernest Holmes (1887-1960). Born in Maine, Holmes moved to Boston as a teenager where he took a two-year course in public speaking. At this time he was drawn to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (another major influence on the New Thought movement), as well as to Eddy’s textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Later he would study other major figures in the New Thought movement, such as William Walker Atkinson and Thomas Troward.
In 1914, Holmes moved to Venice, California. In 1919, he published his first book, Creative Mind. His magnum opus, Science of Mind, was first published in 1926. Though most of Holmes’s ideas can be found in his nineteenth-century precursors, he offered a slicker version of New Thought in his thoroughly twentieth-century salesmanship. He liked to tell stories of persuading homely girls to smile; when their lips parted, he claimed, they were surrounded by rich men eager to pay the bills for orthodontia. Gail Thain Parker, a scholar of New Thought, writes, “Holmes’s smugness is very different from the more exploratory (and sometimes evasive) tone of the first- and second-generation mind curists…. He knew that nothing he would say would shock or surprise; his prose was full of lifetime warranties and unbeatable bargains.”2
Holmes, a powerful speaker but an ambivalent guru, nevertheless suffered his disciples to set up an organisation to promote his ideas. The Institute of Religious Science and the School of Philosophy was incorporated in 1927. In the same year Holmes also founded Science of Mind magazine, which is still published today. His influence was enormous, not only through his own writings but through those who were inspired by him. Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, a best-seller of the mid-twentieth century, drew much of his message from Religious Science.
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Holmes lived long enough to see his organisation subject to schisms and infighting. Shortly before Holmes’s death, his protégé Obadiah Harris (who went on to become head of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles) confided to him that he was leaving the movement to find his own path. “I wish I could go with you,” Holmes replied.3
Even so, Holmes’s organisation survives to this day, and his teachings continue to inspire many. One of his central – and perhaps his most influential – ideas is the Law of Attraction. The term was originally coined in the nineteenth century to refer to the soul’s affinity for different spheres of the afterlife, but Holmes gave it its current meaning: “What we shall attract will depend on that on which our thoughts dwell.”4
If you think of prosperity, prosperity will come your way; if your thoughts dwell on disease, suffering, and misfortune, you are laying the ground for your own future unhappiness. These thoughts are not necessarily conscious ones, Holmes contended:
“While most disease must first have a subjective cause, this subjective cause (nine times out of ten) is not conscious in the thought of the person who suffers from it, but is perhaps largely the result of certain combinations of thinking. So while it is true that disease has its prototype in subjective mind, it is also true that the individual who suffers from the disease, frequently has never thought he was going to have that particular kind of trouble. But this does not alter the fact that every disease which comes up through subjectivity, and appears in the body, must come through mind.”5
Healing, by contrast, comes from right thinking, as Quimby had taught decades before. Holmes taught his followers to heal in this way: “First recognise your own perfection, then build up the same recognition for your patient. You are then read to directly attack the thought that binds him, recognising that your word destroys it, and stating that it does. You may then take into account and specifically mention everything that needs to be changed, every so-called broken law or false thought. Then finish your treatment with a realisation of peace, remaining for a few moments in silent recognition that your work is done, complete and perfect.”6
Holmes said that the human mind was composed of two aspects: the “subjective” or “subconscious” mind on the one hand and the “objective” or “conscious” mind on the other. The subjective mind is not conscious but is creative; it is “that part of the mind which is set in motion as a creative thing in the conscious state.” The subjective “sets power in motion in accordance with the thought.”7 The conscious mind must, however, direct the subconscious toward positive goals.
A similar view can be found in the writings of Max Freedom Long, who, in such books as The Secret Science behind Miracles, taught an almost identical system that he traced back to the kahunas, the shamans of Hawaii. According to Long, the Hawaiians used the word unihipili to describe what Holmes called the “subjective mind” and the word uhane as more or less equivalent to Holmes’s “conscious” or “objective mind.” Although both authors use the word “science” in a metaphysical context, it is unlikely that Holmes or Long influenced each other; rather these similarities show how thoroughly these ideas pervaded the alternative spirituality of early twentieth-century America.
The Universe is “Mental”
By contrast, a work called The Kybalion, first published in 1908, was a likely influence on Holmes (see accompanying article). The title page of this anonymous work lists its authors merely as “Three Initiates.” The Chicago occultist William Walker Atkinson is generally acknowledged to have been one of these; Paul Foster Case, founder of the occult order known as Builders of the Adytum, is also sometimes suggested as one of the others.8
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Quote:People who have spent time grazing in metaphysical bookshops may have come across a mysterious volume called The Kybalion, written by “Three Initiates” and first issued by the Yogi Publication Society of Chicago in 1908.
The most familiar edition is a plain volume bound in blue cloth and stamped with gold, in a format like those of other books from the same publisher, including various works on yoga by one Swami Ramacharaka.
The Kybalion claims to be a brief introduction to a mystical tradition that has survived from antiquity. The core of the work is a series of aphorisms that, the authors contend, go back to the “early days” and were “passed on from teacher to student,…the exact signification and meaning of the terms having been lost for several centuries.”
The word, taken at face value, looks vaguely Greek, but it has no meaning in this language (the closest Greek word to it, curiously, is kybeia, meaning “dice game” or “trickery”). It is also tempting to connect this work with the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah, but as a matter of fact the Kabbalah is never mentioned in The Kybalion.
Rather it presents itself as the essence of the teaching of Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Greatest Hermes”), a legendary, semidivine figure who is said to have brought learning to Egypt in the remotest past. Hermes Trismegistus (pictured at top, right side) is often identified both with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (pictured at top, left side).
The Kybalion is organised according to seven basic principles, which, it says, form the basis of occult philosophy:
1. Mentalism. “The All is Mind; the Universe is mental.”
2. Correspondence. “As above, so below; as below, so above.”
3. Vibration. “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”
4. Polarity. “Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites.”
5. Rhythm. “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall.”
6. Cause and Effect. “Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law.”
7. Gender. “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.”
The origins of this book are difficult to trace. As I noted in the accompanying article, “The Secret Science of Mind,” it is believed to have been written by William Walker Atkinson, who operated the Yogi Publication Society in Chicago (he is generally acknowledged to be “Swami Ramacharaka”).
As the first principle – “Mentalism” – suggests, the ideas of The Kybalion bear some resemblance to New Thought, a movement to which Atkinson was closely connected.
The universe, The Kybalion tells us, is contained in “the Mind of the All”: “The All creates the Universe mentally, in a manner akin to the process whereby Man creates Mental Images.” This idea is central to practically all New Thought teachings.
Nevertheless, the book does echo a more remote past. The term “The All,” for example, resembles the Greek to pan – which also means “the all” and which appears in some Hermetic maxims, most famously Hen to pan: “All is one.”
Given the claims made for it, the most obvious source to examine for the roots of The Kybalion is the Corpus Hermeticum or “Hermetic body” of texts. These were composed in the early centuries CE and purport to expound the wisdom of Egypt as narrated in a series of discourses and dialogues including Hermes and his son Tat (a version of “Thoth”). And indeed there are intriguing resemblances between these works and The Kybalion.
The first text of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Poimandres (whose name is probably a Greek adaptation of the Egyptian p-eime-n-re or “mind of authority”), tells us that the source of the universe was nous – consciousness or mind – much as The Kybalion asserts the principle of “Mentalism.” Moreover, this divine mind is described as “being androgyne and existing as light and life” – which parallels the concept of “Gender” as set out in The Kybalion.
The Kybalion also speaks of the principle of correspondence. This idea appears in another ancient Hermetic text: the extremely brief and elliptical Emerald Tablet, which says, “Quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, et quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius”: “What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like what is above, to enact the wonders of the one thing.” (The Emerald Tablet is said to have originally been written in Syriac, a Semitic language spoken in antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean world, but it survives only in somewhat dissimilar translations in Latin and Arabic.)
Whether there really was a collection of aphorisms known as The Kybalion that was passed down from master to pupil from ancient times is hard to say. There are, to my knowledge, no copies of it in any form that predate the 1908 edition, but that does not mean there were none.
And there are claims of similarly hidden texts in other traditions. The Russian esotericist Boris Mouravieff claimed that esoteric Christianity has an unpublished set of aphorisms called The Golden Book, some of which he quotes in his three-volume work Gnosis: Study and Commentaries on the Esoteric Tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy (although these do not resemble the maxims of The Kybalion to any great degree).
In a blog posting, Tarot scholar Mary K. Greer suggests a plausible direct source for The Kybalion. In 1884, Anna Kingsford, an Englishwoman who founded an organisation called the Hermetic Society, published a book entitled The Virgin of the World of Hermes Trismegistus, which presents an adaptation of the Hermetic texts. As Greer points out, the introduction to this book bears a strong similarity to many of the ideas in The Kybalion. And in fact the introduction to The Virgin of the World, written by Kingsford’s associate Edward Maitland, does contain a number of things that are echoed in The Kybalion.
For example, Maitland asserts that consciousness is “the indispensable condition of existence,” and that matter “is a mode of consciousness,” which certainly resonates with The Kybalion’s doctrine of mentalism. Maitland also mentions “the law of correspondence between all planes, or spheres, of existence.” He also speaks of “the doctrine of Karma,” which dictates “the impossibility either of getting good by doing evil, or of escaping the penalty of the latter” – an obvious parallel to The Kybalion’s “law of cause and effect.” In light of these resemblances and The Kybalion’s insistence that it contains the essence of Hermetic teaching, it is very likely that Kingsford and Maitland’s work was at least one of The Kybalion’s sources.
Thus it is possible to trace out a lineage for The Kybalion: the original Hermetic texts, which have been known in the Western world since the fifteenth century and which have existed in English versions since at least the seventeenth; and the digest of these texts as presented by Kingsford and Maitland in Victorian London.
But there is a major difference between the original Hermetic teachings and the New Thought–flavoured doctrines of The Kybalion. The Corpus Hermeticum did not exist in a philosophical vacuum; its elevated and abstruse dialogues form only a part of the ancient Hermetic literature. Much of the rest consists of magical texts, and scholars have become increasingly aware that these cannot be so easily divorced in content or inspiration from the Hermetic writings.
What does this mean in short? It means that the ancient Hermetists probably did not use a type of New Thought-like mind power in their practice. Rather they probably made use of such things as magical rituals, divination, and invocations of the gods, just as we see in most ancient religions. The use of mind power as we find it in New Thought seems to be very much an innovation of the nineteenth century.
Hence the aphorisms in The Kybalion are very likely a pious fraud. Certainly their style and mode of thought are more evocative of twentieth-century America than of ancient Egypt or Greece. Even so, it would be mistaken to conclude that this work is unfaithful to the tradition it invokes. A spiritual tradition is based, certainly, on timeless and unchanging truths; but the application to which these truths are put will vary from age to age, in accordance with that age’s need. In this sense, The Kybalion can lay genuine claim to the Hermetic heritage.
In any event, The Kybalion – its name allegedly going back to the Egyptian mysteries, although its meaning was supposedly lost – set forth seven principles of metaphysical truth, the first being “the principle of mentalism” – “The Universe is mental – held in the Mind of the all….the Universe and all It contains, is a mental creation of The all.”9 Compare this to Holmes’s statement “There is one mental law in the universe, and where we use it, it becomes our law because we have individualised it.”10 (The similarities extend to the printing of both sentences in all capital letters.)
Since the universe was “mental” in its essence, Holmes prescribed what today is called “creative visualisation” as a means of attaining well-being. Here is his advice to someone who is seeking success in business: “Every day he should see his place filled with people. See them looking at and finding pleasure in his merchandise; see them comparing prices and realising that he is offering good values; see them delighted with the service he is giving…. Make a mental picture of it all. We are dealing with Intelligence, and we should recognise the Power we are working with – realising our Oneness with it – and then we should ask for what we wish and take it.”11
A related approach is affirmation. Like the ancient Semites, who believed in a mystical unity between a word and the thing it represented, Holmes believed that the spoken word held the power to transform reality, and he included affirmations as part of his prescribed practice.
He recommended making this statement, for example, as part of a “treatment” for “supply”: “I always have an abundance of money and an abundance of whatever it takes to make life happy and opulent. There is a continuous movement toward me of supply, of money, of all that I need to express the fullest life, happiness and action.”12
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Image from a promotional booklet produced by the Rosicrucian Order AMORC in the 1940s.
Science of Mind and Magic
Anthropologists have classically distinguished between magic and religion. Magic uses certain techniques such as incantation, sacrifice, and ritual as a way of manipulating unseen powers. Religion often uses the same methods but it does so as a way of supplicating God or the gods through prayer and meditation. Magic is a kind of sacred technology, while religion usually involves a relationship to a personal deity. Science of Mind – and the religion of positive thinking as a whole – is much closer to magic than to religion. While it does not prescribe arcane rituals or weird spells, it does attempt to manipulate the primordial force of the universe – mind – on the practitioner’s behalf.
There is no theological problem in this from a New Thought perspective, because God is all-good and all-loving and wants us to live in health and abundance; our failure to do so is simply the result of faulty thinking and a failure to claim our due. The constant use of the word “Science” by figures from Quimby to Holmes underlines the quasi-technological mindset that operates in these teachings, and suggests how much they owe to the industrial age that gave them birth: mind is an impersonal force that can be harnessed in much the same way as steam or electricity.
While New Thought and Religious Science insist that they are part of a tradition that has always been known to adepts – the healing miracles of Jesus are frequently cited as cases in point – there is comparatively little in traditional esotericism that resembles these teachings. Certainly it has long been taught, particularly by Plato and his philosophical descendants, that there is an ideal world of forms that can be perceived by the higher intellect and that serve as prototypes for the things of materiality. But the teaching that someone can not only perceive these archetypes but manipulate them to change physical reality is extremely rare. The traditional view was that a true philosopher did not care about the material world and occupied himself as little as possible with it.
Even the occultism of the Renaissance, with its cumbrous magical technology, did not lay any particular emphasis upon thought power. According to Renaissance savants such as Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, the magus can affect the higher dimensions, but does so by operating upon their corresponding objects in the physical world. To bring down beneficent solar or jovial influences, one wears stones or eats herbs that are associated with these benign influences. Magical formulae were also employed, but not as affirmations – many of these incantations consist of words in no known language – and the goal was often to subject spirits and demons to the magician’s will.
The world of traditional magic is thus very far removed from the streamlined positive thoughts and affirmations of Religious Science and its kin. To speculate wildly for a moment, perhaps this is one sign of the New Age proclaimed by Swedenborg and Evans – that what formerly required intricate spells and bizarre operations can now be accomplished by using the power of the mind and the spoken word.
This, of course, assumes that the methods of Religious Science actually work, and such claims are hard to assess. Certainly there are any number of people who have been willing to testify on behalf of these procedures, and their claims must be taken seriously enough. But we have no way of knowing how many of them there are as opposed to the numbers of those who have tried and failed. Most of the people I have known through New Thought circles appear no richer, happier, healthier, or more successful than much of the rest of humanity. And while I have known people who have gotten rich over the years – some of them staggeringly rich – their secret was probably not affirmations or thought power but the usual combination of talent, hard work, and sheer luck – and, indeed, enormous quantities of all three.
Nonetheless, the claims of the thought power gurus from Quimby to Holmes (not to mention latter-day figures such as the entity known as Abraham, channelled by Esther Hicks, and Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret) cannot be dismissed wholesale. Thought power, like so many aspects of the metaphysical realm, occupies a liminal space between truth and falsity. As soon as you have decided it is all nonsense, something pokes you on the shoulder and tells you it may not be nonsense after all. But if you become an enthusiastic believer, you may end up disappointed.
To speak personally, I would be willing to say this much. The basic idea behind positive thinking is true: there is a mental world that underlays the physical, and thoughts can influence events in ways that can seem bizarre or even paranormal. But the interplay of thought and actuality is not entirely explained by a few simplistic axioms and the usual lifetime warranties. Other factors operate as well – the obscure but overwhelming forces that are sometimes called fate and destiny; the actions of a mind that cannot always be understood, much less manipulated, by the conscious ego; and of course the “time and chance” that, the Bible reminds us, “happeneth to all” (Eccl. 9:11).
To the extent that positive thinking and mental science help us focus upon our goals and eliminate negative mental patterns, they can be useful. But they are usually not very effective substitutes for action. And if they foster a self-centred attitude that focuses on “my” prosperity and “my” health, or, still worse, dismisses the suffering of others on the grounds that somehow they brought it all upon themselves by wrong thinking, these ideas can cause serious trouble. We must never lose sight of the fact that the power of thought includes the power to enslave the mind. And the ultimate goal of liberation may not be to make our thoughts manifest in the world of desire, but to free ourselves from them as much as is possible in this world of entanglements.
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