Wallace Wattles and the New Thought Movement

In Wallace D. Wattles' 1910 self-help classic, The Science of Getting Rich, he describes a method of psychological training that he calls Mental Science. The general idea is that your thought has power to affect the physical world around you. Change the little random events and decisions that determine your luck throughout a given day, and the mathematics involved in how things "organically" unfold in natural and social systems result in very large and significant changes.

After a lifetime of what he considered to be personal failure, Wattles felt he had finally come across the perfect way to succeed at just about everything in life, be it health, wealth or personal power. He felt compelled to write it all down, and proceeded to do so for the last several years of his life. In addition to The Science of Getting Rich, Wattles also wrote The Science of Being Well and The Science of Being Great in what his daughter described as a flurry of activity before he died.

The author writes that he noticed the trend while voraciously reading about the science, faith and thought of the world. After assimilating all these ideas, he believed he'd found a clear trend running throughout the entirety of human thought on how the world actually worked - the mystery explained. Obviously, if you'd found the answer to life, the universe and everything, you'd want to tell someone about it.

The text draws on religious and philosophical thought from all over the world, picking the juicy little bits from such disparate sources as Marconi, Emerson and Spinoza. Especially prevalent is the notion that all energy and matter are essentially the same thing, so in theory, if you could influence a single small, but unmistakably critical decision, you could influence any event, no matter how big or how improbable.

Wattles decided to outline this idea in this book (and others) as a prescription for conducting one's own thoughts in a "Certain Way," to achieve specific goals. Wattles promises the reader in the introduction, "the science herein applied is an exact science, and failure is impossible." His audience were people in the early 20th century United States, where millions of people living in the tenement sections of the large cities left school to work while still children, and worked 16 hour days to the exclusion of time for reading. He realized such a book would have to be practical and easily digestible. It also had to be very generally inoffensive.

The Science of Getting Rich is now enjoying a popular resurgence, due to the publicity given in the movie, "The Secret." When Rhonda Byrne hit her personal and emotional rock bottom, her daughter sent her a copy of the book. The ideas contained set her off on a 4-month reading jog where she made that connection herself, giving her the idea to contact other practitioner and student of Wattles' work together in "The Secret."

Wattles borrowed much from the then still young U.S. New Thought movement. He was a student of Dr. Phineas Quimby, who had laid out the principles of New Thought as they applied to the mind-body connection 40 years before. Many continued on with Dr. Quimby's work, eventually broadening the concept to apply to the nothing less than the entire Universe. Wattles was also a contemporary of such other self-help genre pioneers as Thomas Troward and Charles F. Haanel.

There was a great deal of popular thought going around in the late 19th century that was investigating the relationship of thought to the physical world. Consider, at the same time the theories of Quantum Mechanics and practical applications of electricity were cutting edge technology. Curious intellectuals actively sought information on not only science and philosophy, but also "Oriental" and ancient occultism. Ideas as thought manifestation and visualization were heavily borrowed from such practices. The influential book Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World was published in 1906 by William Walker Atkinson and had proven very popular. Madame Blavatsky created her highly influential New York City Theosophical Society in 1875, blending science, faith and mental practice.

Wattles himself died in 1911, perhaps knowing what effect his work would have on future generations. Though, he certainly seemed to know how important it was to get his ideas on paper before he died. It is thought his early death at 51 may have influenced the sales of his book on wellness, though the ideas contained therein have certainly been subtly rewritten in the form of many diet books of the 1970s and 80s.

Wattles' other books include A New Christ, Health Through New Thought and Fasting, Making of the Man Who Can and Hellfire Harrison (a novel).

Because his works were published before 1923, they are today a matter of public domain, and freely available online in electronic form. As such, many organizations publish the title and give it away for free, in exchange for personal information or signing up for a newsletter or use it as part of a larger book.