New Thought

Fountainhead — Phineas P. Quimby (1802–1866). A clockmaker from Lebanon, New Hampshire, Quimby took up Mesmerism in the late 1830s and, working in Portland, Maine, developed the conviction that disease is rooted in false belief and that correcting the belief is the cure.

He left no organized church and few finished writings (his papers were not published as The Quimby Manuscripts until 1921), but he is rightly called the father of New Thought.

• First popularizers. Warren Felt Evans, a Quimby patient and former Swedenborgian minister, wrote the earliest books systematizing the mental-cure idea in the 1860s–1880s. Independently, Prentice Mulford (“thoughts are things”) and Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s Transcendentalism fed the same stream of practical idealism.
• The teacher of teachers — Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925). This is the pivotal, under-recognized figure. A onetime editor for Mary Baker Eddy who broke from her, Hopkins set up her own seminary in Chicago and personally trained or ordained the people who went on to found nearly every major New Thought church: Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (Unity), Nona Brooks (Divine Science), and figures in the lineage that reached Ernest Holmes (Religious Science), as well as the writer H. Emilie Cady. The movement’s institutional family tree runs largely through her.
• The churches. Unity was founded in 1889 by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City, after Myrtle’s recovery from tuberculosis through affirmative prayer (its periodical Modern Thought dates the founding). Divine Science grew from two roots that merged — Malinda Cramer in San Francisco (1880s) and the Brooks sisters (Nona Brooks, Fannie James, Althea Small) in Colorado — formally established as the Divine Science Church of Denver by 1899. Religious Science / Science of Mind was articulated by Ernest Holmes, whose The Science of Mind (1926) is its textbook; he incorporated the Institute of Religious Science in 1927.
• The British bridge & the prosperity wing. Thomas Troward, a retired British judge, gave New Thought its most philosophically rigorous statement (The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, 1904). The prosperity strand turned the method toward wealth: Wallace Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich, 1910) and, drawing on the same current, Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937).

Mind / consciousness as causally primary. Mind is the creative cause; the material world is its effect, not the other way round. (→ All Is One/Consciousness Is Fundamental, Only Love Is Real.)

• Mental causation. Inner states — belief, expectation, feeling — propagate outward into health, relationship, and circumstance. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer, Only Love Is Real.)
• Healing through right belief. Disease is sustained by error in consciousness; correcting the belief restores the body. This is Quimby’s original discovery and the movement’s founding act. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer.)
• Affirmative prayer / “treatment.” Prayer is not petition to a distant God but the deliberate, affirmative declaration of the desired truth as already real — Religious Science formalized this as “spiritual mind treatment.” (→ The Inner Creates the Outer, The Inner Creates the Outer.)
• Prosperity consciousness. Abundance is a state of mind first; wealth follows a settled inner conviction of supply. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer, The Inner Creates the Outer.)
• The indwelling divine. God is immanent Principle, “the Father within,” a power each person can consciously use — not an external authority to be obeyed. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer/All Is One.)

Phineas Quimby — the fountainhead; mental healing as the correction of false belief.

• Thomas Troward — The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904); the movement’s most rigorous philosopher.
• Ernest Holmes — The Science of Mind (1926); founder of Religious Science.
• Charles Fillmore — co-founder of Unity (1889).
• William Walker Atkinson — thought-vibration and “thought-force”; also the likely “Three Initiates” of The Kybalion (1908).
• Prentice Mulford — “thoughts are things.”
• Wallace Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich (1910); the prosperity wing.
• Deep cuts: Florence Scovel Shinn; Robert Collier; Christian D. Larson; Genevieve Behrend (Troward’s one student).
• Church founders & teachers: H. Emilie Cady (Lessons in Truth); Myrtle Fillmore; Nona Brooks (Divine Science); Annie Rix Militz.
• Emma Curtis Hopkins — “the teacher of teachers”; trained the founders above (named in prose; no node yet).

New Thought is the sharpest practical statement of several Atlas truths. It states The Inner Creates the Outer (belief and expectation shape outcome) as a healing method, The Inner Creates the Outer (the subconscious can be re-impressed) as the mechanism of affirmative prayer, The Inner Creates the Outer (the outer mirrors the inner), The Inner Creates the Outer (attention is creative), The Inner Creates the Outer (identity precedes circumstance — you receive what you are in consciousness), The Inner Creates the Outer (vibration — strongest in Atkinson’s “thought-vibration”), and Only Love Is Real (mental causation as the movement’s load-bearing claim). A reader can drop from any of these truths straight into this trunk.

Grew from: Mesmerism (Quimby’s direct root — he began as a mesmerist) and Hermeticism (the “all is Mind” mentalism, carried into the movement most explicitly by Atkinson’s Kybalion), with Emerson’s Transcendentalism and Swedenborg’s idealism as American soil., Split from / alongside: Christian Science — Mary Baker Eddy was, like New Thought, a Quimby patient, but she founded a closed, centrally-controlled church and repudiated the open, eclectic New Thought movement; the two are doctrinal cousins that became rivals. → Seeded: the entire 20th-century manifestation lineage — positive thinking, the Law of Attraction (Atkinson coined the phrase in its modern sense; later The Secret), and the Law of Assumption (Neville Goddard’s Troward-influenced refinement)., Navigation: the full roster, churches, and primary sources live at → (this page is the doctrinal deep page; that page is the thematic index).