New Thought

The Law of Attraction is the best-known thing New Thought has produced, and its lineage is documented well enough to set out plainly.

The premise is that thought is causal: that sustained attention to a desired outcome tends to bring it about, and that attention to a feared one does the same for the fear. The mechanism offered has shifted with the science of the day. Nineteenth-century writers spoke of mind acting directly on mind and on matter; twentieth-century ones borrowed the vocabulary of vibration and resonance; recent presentations reach for quantum mechanics, which does not support them and is not, on any reading of it, about what a person wants.

The line runs like this. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, working as a mental healer in Maine from the 1840s to the 1860s, held that illness follows from mistaken belief and is cured by correcting the belief. Prentice Mulford, in essays collected as Thoughts Are Things from 1889, gave the doctrine its popular shape and a good deal of its later vocabulary. William Walker Atkinson published Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World in 1906, which is where the phrase itself becomes a title. Wallace D. Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, applying the teaching to money specifically and without embarrassment.

Its twenty-first-century revival is a single identifiable event rather than a drift. Rhonda Byrne released the film The Secret in 2006 and the book of the same name that year; Byrne has said that Wattles's book was her starting point. It sold in the tens of millions and returned the doctrine to mass circulation with most of the older religious framing stripped away. What it added was emphasis. The earlier writers coupled mental discipline to work, service and character, and were often quite specific about the work. The Secret presents the mental act as very nearly sufficient by itself.

The through-line from Quimby to Byrne is continuous, American, and roughly a hundred and eighty years long. It is not ancient. It is not Hermetic in origin, whatever the later borrowing of as above, so below suggests. And it is not a suppressed teaching recovered against opposition, which is the claim the title makes and the claim that sells it.

The Law of Attraction draws three distinct objections, and they are worth keeping apart because they carry different weight.

The first is empirical. The claim that directed thought influences external events is a causal claim, it has been available for testing for well over a century, and it has not been supported. Where it appears to work, ordinary explanations are sufficient: a person who forms a specific intention attends differently, acts differently, asks for things they would not otherwise have asked for, and notices openings they would have walked past. Promoters frequently accept exactly this account and present it as vindication. It is a different claim, and it does not need the metaphysics.

The second is methodological, and it is the sharper one. The doctrine is built so that failure cannot register against it. If the desired thing arrives, the law worked. If it does not, belief was insufficient, or a contrary thought was harboured, or the universe had something better in view. No outcome is treated as disconfirming, which is what people mean when they call it unfalsifiable, and it is also what makes the teaching so durable in the face of experience.

The third is moral, and it has drawn the most sustained comment. If circumstances follow from thought, then circumstances are evidence about thought. That conclusion follows directly, and promoters have not consistently avoided drawing it: that the sick attracted their illness, that the poor attracted their poverty, that people caught in disasters or atrocities were at some level in accord with what happened to them. Critics have pressed this point hard, and the answers from within the movement have ranged from careful qualification to statements that make the implication entirely explicit. The objection is not that promoters intend cruelty; most plainly do not. It is that the logic of the doctrine delivers it anyway, and that the burden this places on people who are already suffering is real and falls on them regardless of what was intended.

There is a fourth consideration which is not an objection to the idea but to a particular use of it. Mental attitude is sold as an alternative to medical treatment for serious illness, and as an alternative to organised action against material conditions. Where that substitution is made, the cost is borne by the person who made it.

Alongside the Law of Attraction, New Thought produced a second, closely related teaching that has had its own long afterlife: the Law of Assumption, associated above all with Neville Goddard (1905-1972), a Barbados-born teacher who lectured in New York and Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1970s. Where the Law of Attraction speaks of attracting what one dwells on, Goddard's formula is sharper and more inward: assume the feeling of the wish already fulfilled, live in that assumption as a present fact, and the outer world is said to conform to it. "Imagination creates reality" is his summary. His short books, Feeling Is the Secret (1944) and The Power of Awareness (1952), are the primary statements, and his lectures are the direct ancestor of a great deal of what circulates now.

The techniques that fill contemporary manifestation culture are mostly recent packagings of these older ideas, and can be dated:

• Affirmations, repeated present-tense statements of the desired condition, descend from New Thought and from Emile Coue's autosuggestion of the 1920s ("every day, in every way, I am getting better and better").
• Vision boards, collages of images of what one wants, are a late-twentieth-century form of the older New Thought 'treasure map', given mass circulation after The Secret in 2006.
• Scripting, writing out the desired reality in detail as though it had already happened, is a direct application of Goddard's method.
• Intention setting generalises the same act into a deliberate, often ritualised, statement of what one means to bring about.
• The 369 method, writing a desire three times in the morning, six at midday, nine at night, is a specifically internet-era coinage, spreading on social media around 2020 and loosely and baselessly attached to Nikola Tesla's supposed regard for those numbers.

None of this is ancient, and honest treatment says so: it is a documented lineage running from nineteenth-century New Thought through Goddard to a twenty-first-century online industry. The serious objection is the same one recorded against the Law of Attraction generally, that a doctrine crediting the mind with sole causal power over circumstances implies, by its own logic, that those who suffer misfortune or illness produced it by wrong thinking, a corollary its gentler promoters tend not to state but cannot easily escape.