A Teacher
Ernest Holmes
Science of Mind
The transmission
Ernest Holmes was born in 1887 in Lincoln, Maine, the youngest of nine children in a poor farming family, and left formal schooling early, pursuing an intense program of self-education.
As a young man in Boston and then California he immersed himself in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New Thought of Christian D.
Larson, and above all the mental science of Thomas Troward, whose dual-mind framework became the backbone of his thinking. He also absorbed Emma Curtis Hopkins’s teaching and elements of the broader Quimby-derived tradition, working in the 1910s and 1920s as a popular lecturer on practical metaphysics.
In 1926 Holmes published The Science of Mind, the comprehensive textbook of the system he named Religious Science, and he founded the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles, which grew into the Religious Science / Science of Mind movement.
Holmes presented his work as an open synthesis—drawing from science, philosophy, and the world’s religions—and consciously resisted turning it into a closed dogma. His central doctrine held that there is one Universal Mind, an impersonal creative Law that responds to thought, and that “affirmative prayer” or “spiritual mind treatment” is the deliberate technique for embodying a desired condition. He remained the movement’s leading figure until his death in 1960.
What they gave
The synthesis of Science of Mind: Integrates New Thought, Troward’s mental science, Emersonian idealism, and world religion into a single, systematic textbook framework.
- Spiritual mind treatment: Codifies “affirmative prayer” as a structured, multi-step technique (recognition, unification, realization, thanksgiving, release) for embodying a chosen state.
- The impersonal creative Law: Articulates a Universal Mind that responds mechanically and impartially to thought “by corresponding,” not by favor—“it can do for us only by doing through us.”
- Institutional codification: Establishes Religious Science and its training of practitioners, professionalizing the practice of mind-power treatment.
In their 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.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Thomas Troward (decisive); Ralph Waldo Emerson; Christian D.
Larson; Emma Curtis Hopkins; the Quimby-derived New Thought tradition.
- Taught / Influenced: the Religious Science movement and today’s Centers for Spiritual Living; the enduring Science of Mind magazine and its readership; subsequent affirmative-prayer and practical-spirituality teachers.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- The Science of Mind1926
- Creative Mind1919