What is New Thought?
New Thought is a 19th-century American spiritual movement that treats consciousness as causally primary. It holds that one unified divine mind underlies all reality and that focused thought and inner imagery can shape outer circumstance. The movement produced the modern Law of Attraction§ literature and most 20th-century self-help.
The lineage
Phineas Quimby (1802–1866) treated patients in Maine using what he called the Christ method. His core idea was simple: symptoms follow beliefs. Change the belief, and the symptom changes too. One of his patients, Mary Baker Eddy, went on to found Christian Science, which became its own institution with stricter doctrine. The looser stream that did not follow Eddy became New Thought. It was decentralised from the start, organised around small denominations including Unity, Religious Science, and Divine Science, and sustained by a steady output of practical-mysticism books pitched at a popular American audience.
Working assumptions
New Thought writers share a small set of operating premises. There is one divine mind, called God, the All, or the Infinite depending on the author. Human consciousness is continuous with and derived from that mind. Scripture and tradition are symbolic descriptions of psychological and spiritual realities, not historical reports. Disciplined attention to thought, feeling, and inner imagery shapes outer circumstance. The vocabulary of prosperity, abundance, [manifestation](lexicon:manifestation), and demonstration all comes from this tradition.
New Thought versus adjacent traditions
New Thought is sometimes conflated with Theosophy§, but the two diverged in focus early on. Theosophy developed an elaborate cosmology of planes and root races and positioned itself as esoteric knowledge for a trained few. New Thought stayed practical, keeping its focus on healing and prosperity and writing for a general audience. New Thought is also distinct from Christian Science. Both trace back to Quimby, but Christian Science developed binding theological doctrine and a formal church structure. New Thought produced no single church, no creed, and no authoritative text. It is a current, not an institution. Hermeticism§ is another frequent comparison. The overlap is real: both treat mind as primary and both read sacred texts symbolically. But Hermeticism is rooted in ancient Greek-Egyptian philosophy and Renaissance magic. New Thought is a distinctly 19th-century American Protestant reframing of similar ideas.
Why it matters
Almost every large-selling 20th-century self-help book descends from New Thought. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, Wayne Dyer's§ bibliography, and Esther Hicks's Abraham material all carry its fingerprints. The tradition itself is rarely named in those books. Knowing the lineage explains why so much modern spiritual marketing sounds the way it does: the vocabulary of abundance, the claim that belief shapes reality, the equation of prayer with visualisation. These are not independent inventions. They are a single tradition, replicated across a century.
Last reviewed 2026-05-27
— end of entry —
Working through the vocabulary? Get one entry like this in your inbox each Sunday.