Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Desire, Faith and Will
To fix on what you want and hold it with intense, unselfish desire, confident faith, and a settled will — the ‘incessant and persistent demand’ that you maintain until the aim takes shape, while taking it as your own starting point.
Pick the aim and accept where you stand as the starting point. Desire it intensely and for an unselfish purpose — “as the magnet attracts the steel.” Hold it as a daily, persistent demand, backed by a settled will: “I can do it, I will do it.” Persist through the slow growth — but keep honest checkpoints, take action, and don’t read an unmet good goal as proof you “desired wrong.”
What it is
Beyond cheerful thinking, Ella Wheeler Wilcox taught a more directed practice in The Heart of the New Thought (1902): fix on what you want and hold it with concentrated desire, faith, and will until it materialises. Her boldest statement of it: “The incessant and persistent demand of our hearts and minds MUST be granted.” Desire is to be intense — “Desire success so intensely that you attract it as the magnet attracts the steel” — but also unselfish: “If we persistently desire good things to come to us for unselfish purposes. we will eventually find our desires being realized.” And the will side is a flat, repeated self-command: from “Destiny,” “You can do it—you must do it—you will do it,” with the conviction that “You are the maker and moulder of your own destiny.”
The Method
Faithful to The Heart of the New Thought:
- Choose the aim, and accept where you stand as the starting point. From “Destiny”: “Believe your position is the right starting point for you, merely the starting point.” No grievance about the beginning — just the goal and the first step.
- Desire it intensely. Not lukewarm wishing — generate a strong, magnetised wanting: “Desire success so intensely that you attract it as the magnet attracts the steel.”
- Keep the desire unselfish. Wilcox conditions the promise on motive: desire good things “for unselfish purposes.” Tie the want to a purpose beyond bare ego.
- Hold it as a constant, persistent demand. The operative word is incessant: keep the heart-and-mind demand alive day after day rather than wishing once and forgetting — “the incessant and persistent demand. MUST be granted.”
- Add the settled will and faith. Speak and feel it as decided: “You can do it—you must do it—you will do it.” Take yourself as “the maker and moulder of your own destiny,” which is the faith that makes the will credible.
- Persist until it takes shape. As with her affirmations, results may be “of slow growth”; you maintain the desire-faith-will through the lag until the aim “materializes.” (Sourcing note: quoted lines are Wilcox’s; the numbered structure is attributed paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) packaged New Thought’s “desire + faith” doctrine in plain, exhortatory prose in The Heart of the New Thought (1902).
Her version sits beside the movement’s classic desire-and-faith teachings — Wattles’ grateful, faith-held vision; Trine’s “thought force”; Collier’s “one dominating desire”; and the will-training stream of Haddock — and prefigures Hill’s “definiteness of purpose + burning desire.” Her distinctive notes are the “magnet” image, the unselfish-purpose condition, and the blunt will-command “you must do it.” → Contrast (don’t duplicate):
- Collier’s “one dominating desire” concentrates on a single ruling want; Wilcox’s adds the explicit unselfish-purpose condition and the magnet/intensity image.
- Wattles’ hold the vision with faith and purpose centres a gratitude-and-faith held mental picture; Wilcox emphasises intense desire + a willed self-command (“you must do it”).
- Haddock’s resolve-to-will regime drills the faculty of will mechanically; Wilcox fuses desire, faith, and will into one sustained “demand.”
- Wilcox’s “I am” assertions claim present identity; this practice projects a future aim held by desire and will.
Common refinements
Desire without action. Wilcox’s own “starting point” framing implies you move; intense wanting that never becomes effort is daydreaming.
- Mistaking persistence for wisdom. “Incessant demand” can keep you locked onto a goal that the evidence says to drop or change. Build in honest checkpoints; persistence is a tool, not a virtue in itself.
- Self-blame on failure. “It must be granted” is an overclaim; an unrealised good goal is often not your fault. Don’t read failure as proof you “desired wrong.”
- Selfish or vague aims. Her promise is conditioned on unselfish purpose and a definite want; fuzzy or purely ego wishes don’t get the same traction.