The transmission
Julia Seton (1862–1950; also Sears and Kapp) was an American physician, lecturer, and prolific author who became a leading proponent of the New Thought movement.
In 1905 she founded the Church and School of the New Civilization in Boston, asserting forcefully that “New Thought was a religion” and acting, in her own words, as its high-priestess. She taught and lectured widely on self-healing and higher mental, intellectual, and spiritual unfoldment, with recurring subjects including “Concentration,” “Silence,” and “The New Civilization.” Her best-known practical work, Concentration: The Secret of Success (E.
J. Clode, c.1912), distils her method: disciplined mental focus, supported by breath, as the gateway to both worldly achievement and contact with the divine. The book gives explicit directions for breathing, for concentration, and for “going into the Silence” — an inward state in which scattered attention is unified and, she taught, the inner power is reached.
Seton represents the practical, technique-forward wing of early New Thought, translating its metaphysics into concrete daily mental exercises for a popular audience.
What they gave
Concentration as method: framed unified mental focus as the central, trainable cause of success.
- The Silence, made practical: gave step-by-step breathing and concentration directions for “going into the Silence.”
- Institution-building: founded the New Civilization Church/School, spreading New Thought as an organised teaching.
- Popularisation: authored accessible works turning New Thought principles into usable self-improvement practice.
In their words
We have no more right to pour our discordant states of mind into the lives of those around us, and rob them of their sunshine and brightness, than we have the right to enter their houses and steal the silverware.
Concentration is the first step toward conscious direction and control, and without it we cannot hope to go far into the fulfillment of our own desires.
Individuality is the positive pole of being and thinking, and our personality is the negative pole.
Poise is that quality of the human mind which makes for perfect balance in all of life’s relations. It is activity under control.
Compensation is eternal in the universe. We get what we ask for.
Every thought we carry is creative and must by natural law express somewhere; it must be localized in the physical body or it must be represented as energy which we radiate through the body.
Mind your own business after you know what it is. No matter what anyone does or does not, it cannot affect us unless we think it can, and divert our power of creation and attraction by this thinking.
We only fear what we do not understand, and no one ever fears to express himself only in the degree he is in a false position to himself.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the New Thought stream and its concentration/silence tradition (Emma Curtis Hopkins and contemporaries). Influenced: the New Civilization Church and its students; later concentration-and-silence self-help teaching.
Revelations they taught
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- The Science of Success1914
- Concentration: The Secret of Success1912