The Canon / Pillars / New Thought
Pillars · 1907
Power of Will
Success literature / New ThoughtPower of Will presents the will as a faculty that can be systematically trained, like a muscle, through graded exercise. Its central claim is that selfhood is unfolded by direct personal culture, and that deliberate cultivation of attention, decision, and self-command is the path to character and success.
The book is organized as a practical course, supplying drills for the destruction of bad habit, the ordering of a mental regime, and the strengthening of will. Where much New Thought emphasized healing or attraction, the method here is one of disciplined self-mastery.
As the cornerstone of his Power-Book Library, the work sits at the seam between mind-cure metaphysics and the emerging success literature, prefiguring the character-and-discipline strand of twentieth-century self-development and the personal-power courses that followed.
In its words
The Will is the soul's power of self-direction; yet the soul must decide how and for what purposes this power shall be exercised.
The Will grows by directed exercise.
Practices it teaches
The 'I Resolve to Will' Regime — Haddock's daily will-affirmation and decisive-action drill
The connective tissue of the whole book: the standing auto-suggestion and daily conduct-rules Haddock weaves through every chapter so that will-culture becomes a permanent state, not an exercise.
Attention in Reading & Thinking — Haddock's analytic-reading and bombard-the-subject drills
Two consecutive chapters that turn directed attention onto language and ideas. Haddock's complaint is that "true reading is almost a lost art" — most reading is lazy skimming of "whole but vague pictures of groups…
Sense-Attention Will Training — Haddock's drills for eye, ear, taste, smell, touch
The opening practical course of Power of Will: five chapters of graded drills (Eye, Ear, Taste, Smell, Touch) that all share one move — throw the entire self into a single sense and attend to one object…
Voluntary Attention Drill — Haddock's blank-mind and hold-one-idea exercises
The hinge of Haddock's whole "Mental Regime," and the drill he considers the essence of the will. He quotes William James — "The essential achievement of the Will...
Will-Driven Memory Training — Haddock's skeleton-memorizing and appointed-recall drills
Haddock's memory chapter has "but one 'golden rule'... the iron rule of persistent and intelligent exercise," and one foundation: attention. "The power to remember is measured by the ability to attend...
Regime of the Nerves — Haddock's general-consciousness and nerve-control drill
Haddock's "regime of the nerves" — a set of quiet drills whose principle is that "Cessation of unnecessary motion conserves force" and that habituated control of nervous energy "strengthens and regulates the Will."…
Sound-Exclusion Mastery — Haddock's drill for shutting out hateful noise by will
A small, sharply practical Haddock drill for the universal misery of an inescapable noise — the neighbor's piano, a barking dog, street hawkers, a ticking clock at midnight.
Steadiness & Immobility Drill — Haddock's stand-perfectly-still and hold-the-hand exercises
Haddock's most physical will-builder: holding the body, or a part of it, perfectly motionless by deliberate will, and stripping out every unnecessary movement.
Willed Imagination Building — Haddock's vivid-sensation and consequence-forecasting drills
The closing chapter of Power of Will, and the one most unlike the popular New Thought of his day. Haddock does not teach imagining wealth into existence.
Lineage
The author
Frank Channing HaddockPower of Will — systematic training of the will
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