The Science of Mind

Name: The Science of Mind
Author: Ernest Holmes

New Thought Movement (Religious Science)

The Science of Mind is the comprehensive textbook of the system Ernest Holmes named Religious Science, and its central claim is that there is one Universal Mind, an impersonal creative Law that responds to thought by corresponding to it rather than by favor. Reality, on this view, is governed by a principle that can do for a person only by doing through them, so that the inner conception held in consciousness becomes the pattern of outer experience.

Holmes proceeds by open synthesis, drawing together New Thought, Thomas Troward's mental science, Emersonian idealism, and the teachings of the world's religions into a single systematic framework. From this he codifies "spiritual mind treatment," a structured form of affirmative prayer moving through recognition, unification, realization, thanksgiving, and release, presented as a deliberate technique for embodying a chosen state.

Within the New Thought tradition the work functions as a founding charter, supplying the movement Holmes built with both its metaphysics and its trained practitioners. Its insistence on remaining a living synthesis rather than a closed dogma gave it unusual reach and durability.

In its words

The Law is Infinite and Perfect; but in order to make a demonstration we must first have a mental equivalent of the thing we desire.

And he who knows of the power with which he is dealing, and who plants a seed of thought in Subjectivity, knows that it will come up and bear fruit.

Man's inner world of thought is translated into his outer world of things.

Deeper mind is habitual mind. Whatever we entertain often enough and vividly enough in our surface mind — whether by conscious, deliberate choice or by choice made so rapidly that we are not aware we have made it — eventually passes into deeper mind, where it continues to act automatically.

Practices it teaches