New Thought
A Short History of the New Thought Movement
New Thought is one of the most influential spiritual movements most people have never heard of by name. Its core belief, that the mind plays a powerful role in health, happiness and success, runs through a great deal of modern self help, motivational speaking and popular spirituality. Yet the movement itself began in a specific time and place, nineteenth century New England, with a handful of healers and teachers who disagreed with each other as often as they agreed. This short history traces the main figures and branches, and notes where the movement's claims rest on belief rather than evidence.
Phineas Quimby and the Mind Cure
Most histories of New Thought begin with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a clockmaker from Maine who lived from 1802 to 1866. In the 1830s Quimby became interested in mesmerism, a popular practice at the time that involved putting subjects into trance like states. Over the following years he moved away from the idea of a magnetic fluid and toward a different explanation: that many illnesses were rooted in the patient's beliefs, and that changing those beliefs could bring relief.
Quimby practiced as a healer, eventually in Portland, Maine, and saw many patients. He did not found a church or publish a book in his lifetime, but he left notes and influenced several patients who went on to teach. Among them were Warren Felt Evans, who wrote a number of books on mental healing, and Julius and Annetta Dresser, who later helped spread his ideas.
Today we would say that Quimby's results likely involved a mixture of real relief from stress and expectation, natural recovery, and illnesses with a strong psychological component. His belief that disease was fundamentally an error of mind is a spiritual and philosophical claim, not a medical one.
Mary Baker Eddy and a Split
Another of Quimby's patients was Mary Baker Eddy. After her contact with Quimby and a later experience of recovery from an injury, she developed her own system, published in Science and Health in 1875, and founded the Church of Christ, Scientist. Christian Science grew into a well organized denomination with its own churches and practitioners.
The relationship between Eddy's teaching and Quimby's has been argued over ever since. Eddy insisted her system came from her own revelation and study of the Bible. Supporters of Quimby argued she owed him more than she admitted. Either way, Christian Science and New Thought went separate ways. Christian Science kept a central church structure and a firm doctrine, while New Thought became a looser family of independent teachers and groups.
Emma Curtis Hopkins, the Teacher of Teachers
The person who did most to turn New Thought into a movement was Emma Curtis Hopkins, who lived from 1849 to 1925. She had worked with Eddy before parting ways and setting up her own teaching in Chicago in the 1880s. She ran classes, founded a seminary that ordained ministers, many of them women, and later taught privately in New York.
Hopkins earned the title "teacher of teachers" because so many of her students founded movements of their own. Among those associated with her teaching were:
- Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded Unity in Kansas City, Missouri, which became one of the largest New Thought organizations.
- Malinda Cramer and Nona Brooks, figures in the founding of Divine Science in Denver, Colorado.
- Ernest Holmes, who later founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, first published in 1926.
Her role is a reminder that women held unusual leadership in New Thought at a time when most religious institutions excluded them from the pulpit.
Growth, Books and the Alliance
By the turn of the twentieth century, New Thought was spreading through magazines, lecture tours, small publishers and study groups. Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite, published in 1897, became a bestseller. William Walker Atkinson wrote a stream of books, including Thought Vibration in 1906, and is widely credited with The Kybalion of 1908. Writers such as Wallace Wattles, whose The Science of Getting Rich appeared in 1910, took New Thought principles into the world of money and career.
The psychologist William James paid close attention to all this. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, he discussed what he called the "mind cure" movement as a distinctively American religion of healthy mindedness. He took it seriously as a source of real help to many people, while remaining cautious about its larger claims.
In 1914 several groups came together under the International New Thought Alliance, an umbrella body that still exists. Its creation showed both the reach of the movement and its decentralized nature: it was an alliance of independent groups, not a single church.
Influence Beyond the Movement
New Thought's greatest reach came through people who never joined a New Thought church. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, carried its emphasis on desire, belief and mental focus into business culture. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952, brought similar ideas into mainstream Protestant life, though Peale presented them in Christian terms. In 2006 the book and film The Secret revived the phrase "law of attraction" for a new generation.
Along the way, many of the movement's original nuances were lost. Early teachers spoke of spiritual healing, inner discipline and union with the divine. Later popular versions often reduced the message to a technique for getting things.
A Fair Assessment
New Thought made a lasting contribution by insisting that a person's inner life matters: that attitudes, beliefs and habits of attention shape experience. Modern psychology supports a version of that idea, especially in work on interpretation, expectation and habit.
Its stronger claims are another matter. The belief that disease is essentially mental, or that thoughts attract events directly, is a matter of faith, not established science. At its worst, the movement could encourage people to delay medical care or to blame themselves for misfortune. At its best, it offered hope, practical discipline and a warm, inclusive spirituality to people who found older churches cold.
A Practical Takeaway
If New Thought interests you, read one early source rather than a modern summary. Trine, Atkinson, Hopkins and Holmes are all accessible, and several of their books are in the public domain. As you read, separate the practical advice on attention, habit and attitude from the metaphysical claims about mind and matter. Try the first, reflect on the second, and keep your doctor. That approach honors what the movement got right while staying honest about what remains belief.