The New Thought Movement: History, Founders and Beliefs

New Thought is a family of American religious and philosophical movements, emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century, which teaches that the mind is the primary reality in human life and that right thinking can heal illness and improve one's circumstances. It grew out of the "mental healing" practice of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in Maine and was organised by teachers such as Warren Felt Evans and Emma Curtis Hopkins into churches including Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science. Historians regard it as one of the most influential sources of modern self-help, positive thinking and the law of attraction.

Phineas P. Quimby and the Origins of Mental Healing§

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was born in 1802 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and worked as a clockmaker in Belfast, Maine. In the late 1830s he attended lectures by Charles Poyen, a French itinerant who was popularising mesmerism (or "animal magnetism") in New England. Quimby took up mesmerism and toured with a young subject, Lucius Burkmar, who in trance was said to diagnose the sick.

Over time Quimby noticed that the remedies Burkmar recommended seemed to work whether or not they had any medical value. He concluded that what healed patients was not a magnetic fluid but their own belief. Disease, in his developed view, was largely the product of false ideas, often instilled by physicians and clergy, and it could be corrected by explaining the error to the patient and replacing it with a truer understanding. He sometimes called his method the "science of health" and regarded it as a recovery of the healing practice of Jesus.

From 1859 until shortly before his death in 1866 Quimby ran a practice in Portland, Maine. His patients and students included several people who would carry his ideas forward: Warren Felt Evans, Julius and Annetta Dresser, and Mary Patterson, who would later become known as Mary Baker Eddy. Quimby published little in his lifetime. His manuscripts were edited by Horatio Dresser, Julius's son, and published as The Quimby Manuscripts in 1921.

Warren Felt Evans and the first New Thought books§

Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889), a former Methodist minister, consulted Quimby in 1863 and soon began practising mental healing himself near Boston. He became the first writer to systematise these ideas in print. The Mental Cure (1869) and Mental Medicine (1872) argued that the body is shaped by the mind and that the mind is open to divine influence. Later works such as The Divine Law of Cure (1881) and Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (1886) blended Quimby's insights with Swedenborg, Berkeleyan idealism and Christian mysticism. Where Quimby had healed one patient at a time, Evans produced a body of theory that others could read, teach and adapt.

Intellectual Influences: Swedenborg, Mesmerism, Emerson and Hermeticism§

New Thought did not spring from Quimby alone. Historians, notably Catherine Albanese in A Republic of Mind and Spirit (2007), place it within a broad current she calls American "metaphysical religion", which combined several older streams.

Swedenborg and the doctrine of correspondences§

The Swedish scientist and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) taught that the natural world corresponds point by point to a spiritual world, and that every outward effect has an inward, spiritual cause. Swedenborgian ideas were widely read in nineteenth-century America and supplied New Thought with a vocabulary for treating illness and fortune as outward expressions of inner states. Warren Felt Evans was himself a member of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem.

Mesmerism and animal magnetism§

Franz Anton Mesmer's theory of a healing invisible fluid had been rejected by a French royal commission in 1784, but it survived in popular practice. It gave Quimby his starting point and gave New Thought a lasting interest in suggestion and unseen forces, later recast as "vibrations" and "mental currents."

Emerson and Transcendentalism§

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, especially Nature (1836) and "Self-Reliance" (1841), taught that each person has direct access to a universal spirit, the "Over-Soul." Emerson was not a mental healer, but New Thought writers quoted him constantly and adopted his optimism about human nature.

Hermetic and Neoplatonic themes§

Some New Thought teachers drew explicitly on the Western esoteric tradition. The idea that mind is the ultimate substance of the universe, and that a correspondence links microcosm and macrocosm, echoes themes found in the Corpus Hermeticum and the maxim attributed to the Emerald Tablet. Evans read Hermetic, Neoplatonic and mystical authors, including Jacob Boehme, and by the early twentieth century the anonymous Kybalion (1908) was presenting "Hermetic principles" in openly New Thought terms. Scholars generally see this as a modern reinterpretation rather than a continuous transmission from antiquity.

Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science: Relation and Differences§

Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) visited Quimby in 1862, suffering from chronic illness, and credited him with relief. After his death she experienced a sudden recovery from a serious fall in 1866, which she later described as the moment she discovered Christian Science. Her textbook Science and Health appeared in 1875, and in 1879 she founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston.

The relationship between Eddy and Quimby has been controversial since the 1880s. The Dressers and their allies argued that Eddy's system derived substantially from Quimby; Eddy insisted that her teaching came from her own study of the Bible and divine revelation, and that Quimby had been a mesmerist whose methods she rejected. Modern historians generally acknowledge Quimby's influence on her early thinking while recognising that her mature system is distinctive.

The differences are substantial:

• Metaphysics. Eddy taught that matter, sin, sickness and death are ultimately unreal, and that God, understood as divine Principle, Mind and Love, is the only reality. Most New Thought teachers were less absolute, treating matter as an expression of mind rather than an illusion.
• Organisation. Christian Science became a centralised church governed by Eddy's Manual of The Mother Church, with authorised teachers and practitioners. New Thought remained a loose network of independent groups.
• Purpose. Christian Science focused on healing and spiritual regeneration and was suspicious of using mind for material gain. New Thought increasingly embraced prosperity and personal success.

Christian Scientists generally reject being classified with New Thought, but historians discuss the two together because many early New Thought leaders were dissident former students of Eddy.

Emma Curtis Hopkins, "Teacher of Teachers"§

The most important of those dissidents was Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925). She studied with Eddy in 1883 and briefly edited the Christian Science Journal, but she was dismissed in 1885. She moved to Chicago, where she established a seminary that trained and, from 1889, ordained students, a large proportion of them women.

Hopkins combined mental healing with a mystical Christianity, and her gift was for forming leaders rather than institutions. Among those who studied with her were Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, founders of Unity; Malinda Cramer, a founder of Divine Science; and, late in her life, Ernest Holmes. Gail Harley's biography, Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought (2002), argues that her role was long underestimated. Beryl Satter's Each Mind a Kingdom (1999) shows how women like Hopkins used New Thought to address questions of gender, authority and the body in late-Victorian America.

The New Thought Churches: Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science§

Unity§

Charles Fillmore (1854–1948) and Myrtle Fillmore (1845–1931) began publishing a magazine, Modern Thought, in Kansas City in 1889, adopting the name Unity by 1891. Myrtle attributed her recovery from tuberculosis to the realisation that she was a child of God. Unity developed a prayer ministry, Silent Unity, and remained more explicitly Christian in vocabulary than other New Thought bodies and today is organised as Unity Worldwide Ministries, with its headquarters at Unity Village, Missouri.

Divine Science§

Divine Science arose in two places in the late 1880s and 1890s: in San Francisco under Malinda Cramer, and in Denver under Nona Brooks and her sisters Fannie James and Alethea Small. The Denver group, with its Divine Science College, became the centre of the movement. Divine Science emphasised the omnipresence of God, so that all things are seen as expressions of the one divine substance.

Religious Science and the Science of Mind§

Ernest Holmes (1887–1960) drew on Emerson, Thomas Troward's Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904) and the work of Hopkins. His book The Science of Mind (1926) became the textbook of Religious Science, and in 1927 he founded the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles. Holmes developed "spiritual mind treatment", a structured form of affirmative prayer. The movement split into two bodies in the 1950s and largely reunited in 2011 as the Centers for Spiritual Living.

The International New Thought Alliance§

As these groups multiplied, leaders sought a common framework without central authority. After earlier federations around 1900, the International New Thought Alliance (INTA) took its present name in 1914 and adopted a statement of principles soon afterwards. Its statements emphasised the infinitude of God, the divinity of humanity and the healing power of right thought, while avoiding a binding creed.

William James and the "Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"§

The philosopher and psychologist William James gave New Thought its most serious early academic attention. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), lectures four and five are devoted to what he called the "religion of healthy-mindedness", with the "mind-cure movement" as his principal modern example.

James took the movement seriously, noting that many people reported relief from nervous ailments and chronic complaints, and treating this as evidence that attitude can affect wellbeing. But he also contrasted the healthy-minded temperament with the "sick soul", the outlook of those who feel evil and suffering too deeply to explain them away. James judged the healthy-minded outlook inadequate as a complete philosophy, because it refuses to take the reality of evil seriously. That criticism anticipates many later debates about positive thinking.

Legacy: Positive Thinking, the Prosperity Gospel and the New Age§

New Thought's direct institutional membership has always been modest, but its ideas spread far beyond its churches.

• Success literature. Writers such as William Walker Atkinson, Wallace Wattles and Napoleon Hill turned New Thought metaphysics into practical guides to wealth and achievement, giving rise to the idea now called the law of attraction.
• Positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale, a Reformed Church minister, drew on New Thought sources in The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which brought its techniques into mainstream American Protestantism.
• The prosperity gospel. Historians including Kate Bowler, in Blessed (2013), have traced part of the Pentecostal "Word of Faith" teaching that faith and confession produce health and wealth to New Thought influences, partly via the evangelist E. W. Kenyon, though the extent of that borrowing is debated.
• The New Age. From the 1970s, New Thought themes merged with Theosophy, Eastern religion and humanistic psychology in the New Age movement, and reached their widest audience in Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006).

Mitch Horowitz, in Occult America (2009) and One Simple Idea (2014), presents New Thought as a distinctively American spiritual philosophy whose influence is underestimated. More critical scholars and commentators, such as Donald Meyer in The Positive Thinkers (1965) and Barbara Ehrenreich in Bright-sided (2009), have argued that its emphasis on individual mental states can encourage self-blame for illness and poverty and distract from social causes of suffering. From a scientific standpoint, there is good evidence that expectations, stress and belief influence health in limited ways, as placebo research shows, but no evidence that thought alone cures organic disease or directly shapes external events.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the difference between New Thought and Christian Science?§

Both trace part of their history to Phineas Quimby, but Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, is a single centralised church that teaches matter is unreal. New Thought is a looser network of churches and authors who generally treat matter as an expression of mind and who more readily embrace prosperity teaching. Christian Science does not consider itself part of New Thought.

Who founded the New Thought movement?§

No single person founded it. Phineas P. Quimby is usually regarded as its originator, Warren Felt Evans as its first systematic writer, and Emma Curtis Hopkins as the teacher who trained many founders of its churches.

Is New Thought a Christian movement?§

It began within a broadly Christian framework and groups such as Unity still use Christian language and scripture. However, its teachings on the divinity of humanity and the power of mind differ significantly from mainstream Christian doctrine, and many New Thought communities describe themselves as interfaith or "spiritual but not religious."

What did William James think of New Thought?§

James regarded it as a genuine religious movement with real practical benefits for many people, and he discussed it under the heading of the "religion of healthy-mindedness." He nonetheless considered it incomplete, because it tends to ignore or deny the reality of evil and suffering.

Sources and further reading§

• The Quimby Manuscripts — Phineas P. Quimby, ed. Horatio W. Dresser, 1921
• The Mental Cure — Warren Felt Evans, 1869
• Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures — Mary Baker Eddy, 1875
• The Science of Mind — Ernest Holmes, 1926
• The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James, 1902
• A History of the New Thought Movement — Horatio W. Dresser, 1919
• Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought — Charles S. Braden, 1963
• The Positive Thinkers — Donald Meyer, 1965
• Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 — Beryl Satter, 1999
• Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought — Gail M. Harley, 2002
• A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion — Catherine L. Albanese, 2007
• Occult America — Mitch Horowitz, 2009
• Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel — Kate Bowler, 2013