Wallace Wattles

Wallace Delois Wattles was born in 1860 in the United States (likely Illinois) and lived much of his life in relative poverty and obscurity, experiencing repeated business and personal failures before turning to New Thought in middle age.

He studied the writings of Hegel and Emerson and, by his own account, the “monistic” philosophy he traced to Hindu sources, and he was strongly shaped by the mental science of Thomas Troward.

Politically, Wattles was a committed Christian Socialist who twice ran for office, and he understood his metaphysics partly as a practical answer to economic hardship. In 1910 he published The Science of Getting Rich, a concise, deliberately unmystical manual that distilled New Thought into a step-by-step technique for producing wealth, followed by companion volumes on health and “being great.” His central move was to convert metaphysics into a reproducible method: hold a clear mental image, act on a “Certain Way” with faith and gratitude, and impress one’s purpose on a universal “Formless Substance.” Wattles died in 1911, only a year after his most famous book, but that slim volume would be rediscovered a century later and become, through Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a primary source of the modern Law of Attraction industry.