The transmission
Prentice Mulford was born in 1834 in Sag Harbor, New York, and led an unusually itinerant early life, sailing as a whaler and then joining the California Gold Rush, where he worked as a miner, cook, and eventually a humorist and journalist among the literary circle that included Mark Twain and Bret Harte.
Returning east in the 1870s, he grew disillusioned with public life and withdrew toward solitude and introspection, increasingly preoccupied with the power of thought and the inner life. His turn to metaphysics emerged from this period of withdrawal rather than from formal study under any single teacher.
In the 1880s Mulford produced a series of essays, later collected as Your Forces and How to Use Them and most famously associated with the phrase “Thoughts Are Things,” that helped crystallize early New Thought.
Writing in an accessible, aphoristic style drawn from his journalism, he advanced the idea that thoughts are real, objective forces—formative, magnetic, and capable of shaping health and circumstance. He died in 1891, reportedly found alone in his boat off the Long Island coast, leaving a body of work that supplied New Thought with one of its most memorable slogans and a distinctly literary voice.
What they gave
“Thoughts are things”: Coins and popularizes the slogan crystallizing the claim that thought is an objective, formative force in the world.
- Thought as magnetic force: Frames thoughts as emanations that attract corresponding conditions, an early articulation of attraction prior to its later “scientific” formalization.
- Self-management of the inner life: Presents mind as a lever over health, luck, and circumstance, emphasizing the deliberate cultivation of positive mental states.
- Literary popularization: Brings a readable, essayistic style to metaphysical ideas, widening New Thought’s reach beyond healing-practitioner circles.
In their words
It is one chief characteristic of the material mind to hold tenaciously to the past.
There belongs to every human being a higher self and a lower self—a self or mind of the spirit which has been growing for ages, and a self of the body, which is but a thing of yesterday.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: New England Transcendentalism (especially Emerson); nineteenth-century Spiritualism; the mental-healing currents flowing from the Quimby milieu.
- Taught / Influenced: William Walker Atkinson and the later “thought-force” authors; Henry Wood and other early New Thought writers; the durable popular conviction that “thoughts are things.”
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Your Forces and How to Use Them1886-1892
- Thoughts Are Thingsn.d.
- The God in Youn.d.