09 - Origins. Podcast By cover art

09 - Origins.

09 - Origins.

Listen for free

View show details
Origins. The New Thought movement was based on the teachings of Phineas Quimby (1802–1866), an American mesmerist and healer. Quimby had developed a belief system that included the tenet that illness originated in the mind as a consequence of erroneous beliefs and that a mind open to God's wisdom could overcome any illness.[10] His basic premise was: The trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in [...] Therefore, if your mind had been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge. By my theory or truth, I come in contact with your enemy, and restore you to health and happiness. This I do partly mentally, and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impression and establish the Truth, and the Truth is the cure. During the late 19th century, the metaphysical healing practices of Quimby mingled with the "Mental Science" of Warren Felt Evans, a Swedenborgian minister. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, has sometimes been cited as having used Quimby as inspiration for theology. Eddy was a patient of Quimby's and shared his view that disease is rooted in a mental cause. Because of its theism, Christian Science differs from the teachings of Quimby. In the late 19th century, New Thought was propelled by a number of spiritual thinkers and philosophers and emerged through a variety of religious denominations and churches, particularly the Unity Church and Church of Divine Science (established in 1889 and 1888, respectively), followed by Religious Science (the Institute of Religious Science and Philosophy was established in 1927). Many of its early teachers and students were women; notable among the founders of the movement were Emma Curtis Hopkins, known as the "teacher of teachers", Myrtle Fillmore, Malinda Cramer, and Nona L. Brooks; with many of its churches and community centers led by women, from the 1880s to today. Alongside these ecclesiastical developments, others like Henry Wood in Boston, provided some of the movement’s most systematic literary foundations. In works such as The Symphony of Life, and New Thought Simplified, Wood articulated a structured philosophy of mental causation grounded in disciplined thought and constructive affirmation. His writings presented New Thought not merely as devotional religion but as a practical mental science, emphasizing inner law, character formation, and the deliberate direction of consciousness. Through these works the principles of mental discipline and self-transformation became central to the movement’s broader development. Suggestive Therapeutics and Auto-Suggestion. The psychological framework that later entered New Thought through the language of affirmation, mental discipline, and self-transformation can be traced to the clinical work of the nineteenth century Nancy School in France. Physicians such as Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim advanced the position that hypnosis was a normal psychological state governed by suggestion rather than by occult force. In the United States, these clinical principles were first institutionalized at the Chicago School of Psychology, founded in 1896 by Herbert A. Parkyn. At a time when much of New Thought operated through churches and independent lecturers, the Chicago School framed mental influence in clinical and instructional terms, using the language of scientific psychology rather than theology. Its teaching emphasized that suggestion operated according to fixed mental laws that were termed the Law of Suggestion. Emerging from the Chicago School of Psychology were figures who carried its teachings far beyond the clinic and classroom. Among the most prominent was William Walker Atkinson, who translated the school’s clinical principles of suggestive therapeutics into broader concepts of thought force, personal magnetism, and will development, presenting them as practical methods for everyday life rather than techniques confined to therapeutic treatment. Atkinson also joined with another of the school’s leading protégés, Sydney B. Flower, to establish New Thought magazine, which became the most influential journal of the movement. In 1905, Parkyn’s Auto-Suggestion set out the first sustained, systematic presentation of self-directed suggestion in American mental science. Building on the mental science formulations advanced by his close family friend Henry Wood in Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography (1893), Parkyn framed repeated affirmation and disciplined thought as a deliberate method for reshaping character, health, and circumstance, supplying what became the practical backbone of New Thought’s self-empowerment ethos. Growth. New Thought is also largely a movement of the printed word. Prentice Mulford, through writing Your Forces and How to Use Them, a series of essays published during 1886–1892, was pivotal in the ...
No reviews yet