New Thought Movement: History, Beliefs, and Hermetic Roots

What Is the New Thought Movement

The New Thought movement is one of the most influential spiritual philosophies to emerge from the United States, and also one of the least understood. Its ideas have saturated popular culture so thoroughly that millions of people encounter them daily without knowing they come from a specific intellectual tradition with traceable roots, key figures, and a coherent philosophical framework.

At its core, New Thought teaches that the mind is the primary shaper of reality. This goes beyond the psychological insight that attitude affects outcomes. New Thought teaches that thought, properly understood and aligned with universal law, produces material results directly. Heal the thinking, and healing of the body follows. Align the mind with abundance, and material prosperity follows. This is not wishful thinking, according to New Thought teachers. It is an application of universal law.

New Thought emerged in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, developed through a network of teachers, healers, and writers, and eventually gave birth to religious denominations (Religious Science, Unity Church, Divine Science), self-help traditions (Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale), and the contemporary law of attraction movement. It is the intellectual ancestor of The Secret, of motivational speaking, of prosperity gospel, and of the therapeutic culture that saturates Western life.

Understanding New Thought means understanding where much of modern Western culture's relationship with the mind, belief, and reality actually comes from.

Phineas Quimby and the Origins

The story of New Thought begins with an unusual figure: Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a clockmaker from Maine who became interested in mesmerism (hypnosis) after attending a demonstration by the traveling mesmerist Charles Poyen in 1838.

Quimby began experimenting with mesmerism and discovered that he could apparently produce healing effects in patients through suggestion and mental influence. Over time, he developed a theory: illness was not primarily physical but mental. False beliefs, fears, and wrong thinking created disease. Correct those beliefs, and healing would follow. Quimby's work anticipated both modern psychosomatic medicine and the therapeutic use of suggestion by decades.

Quimby treated thousands of patients in Portland, Maine, during the 1850s and 1860s, including Mary Baker Eddy, who went on to found Christian Science. Eddy acknowledged Quimby's healing of her, though she later disputed how much her system owed to his ideas. Other students of Quimby, particularly Warren Felt Evans, developed Quimby's ideas into what became recognizably New Thought philosophy, publishing books on mental healing in the 1870s and 1880s.

Key Figures in New Thought History

Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849-1925) is the most important figure after Quimby in New Thought history. Initially a student and editor for Mary Baker Eddy, Hopkins broke away to develop her own synthesis, which she taught in Chicago from the 1880s onward. Her students founded several of the major New Thought denominations, earning her the title "teacher of teachers." Ernest Holmes, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, and Malinda Cramer all traced their formation to Hopkins.

Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958) brought New Thought ideas to mass popular audiences through his 1897 book In Tune with the Infinite, which became one of the best-selling books of the early twentieth century. Trine's work emphasized the unity of the human soul with infinite divine intelligence and the practical consequences of living from this awareness.

Wallace Wattles (1860-1911) wrote The Science of Getting Rich (1910), a short, precise book on applying New Thought principles to financial prosperity. Rhonda Byrne acknowledged Wattles as a primary source for The Secret (2006), bringing his ideas to a new generation a century after his death.

Ernest Holmes (1887-1960) founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind (1926), the most comprehensive philosophical synthesis of New Thought. Holmes drew on Hermetic philosophy, Theosophy, Christian Science, and Eastern thought to build a complete metaphysical system. His Centers for Spiritual Living continue worldwide.

William Walker Atkinson (1862-1932) deserves special attention for his role in linking New Thought explicitly to Hermetic philosophy, which he did most directly through the Kybalion (1908), now believed by most scholars to have been written by Atkinson under the pseudonym "Three Initiates."

Core Beliefs and Philosophy

New Thought is not a monolithic system. Different teachers developed different emphases. But several core convictions appear across virtually all New Thought writing.

The most fundamental is that mind or consciousness is primary. Not primary in the sense of subjectively important, but primary in the sense of causally prior to matter. This is the same position as the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism: "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental." Thought is not produced by the brain as a byproduct of chemical processes. Thought is the primary reality, and the brain is one of its expressions.

From this follows the practical conviction that changing your thinking changes your reality. This is not as simple as "think positive thoughts and good things will happen." New Thought teachers emphasized that belief must be genuine and deep, not merely verbal, that unconscious beliefs are more powerful than conscious ones, and that alignment with universal law requires understanding those laws rather than just wishful thinking.

New Thought also teaches the immanence of the divine. God or infinite intelligence is not a distant deity but a present reality within all things, accessible through the human mind. Prayer, in New Thought, is not petition to an external being but affirmation of a present reality, aligning consciousness with the good that already exists at a spiritual level.

Health is a major emphasis in New Thought. Quimby's healing work established this focus, and it continued through the tradition. The conviction that mental correction can produce physical healing has been validated in certain respects by modern psychoneuroimmunology, the field studying the relationship between psychological states and immune function, even if New Thought's more dramatic claims remain beyond scientific verification.

New Thought and Hermetic Philosophy

The connection between New Thought and Hermetic philosophy is not superficial. Several New Thought writers, most clearly Atkinson, were deeply familiar with the Hermetic tradition and understood New Thought as an application of Hermetic principles.

The Hermetic Principle of Mentalism ("All is Mind") is the direct philosophical ancestor of New Thought's central conviction that thought shapes reality. The Principle of Correspondence ("As above, so below; as within, so without") maps directly onto New Thought's teaching that inner mental states create outer circumstances. The Principle of Cause and Effect explains why consistently held beliefs and thoughts produce consistent results in experience.

The Kybalion, published in 1908 and almost certainly written by Atkinson, made this connection explicit. The Kybalion presents the seven Hermetic principles as a philosophical system, then discusses mental transmutation, the art of changing one's mental states and thus one's experience, in terms that closely parallel New Thought practice. The Kybalion was in many ways Atkinson's attempt to give New Thought the philosophical grounding it often lacked by anchoring it in the older Hermetic tradition.

William Walker Atkinson and the Kybalion

William Walker Atkinson (1862-1932) was a Philadelphia lawyer who suffered a physical and mental breakdown in the 1890s and healed himself through New Thought practice. He went on to become the most prolific writer in the New Thought tradition, publishing over 100 books under his own name and several pseudonyms including Yogi Ramacharaka, Theron Q. Dumont, and, most famously, "Three Initiates."

As Yogi Ramacharaka, Atkinson wrote a series of books presenting Hindu philosophy, yoga, and pranayama to Western audiences in accessible form. As Theron Q. Dumont, he wrote books on personal magnetism and mental influence. Under his own name, he wrote on practical mind power, thought vibration, and mental alchemy.

The Kybalion (1908), now attributed to Atkinson by most researchers, represents his most explicitly Hermetic work. It systematized the seven Hermetic principles and connected them to the practice of mental transmutation in a way that bridges ancient Hermetic philosophy and modern New Thought practice. Atkinson's entire body of work can be seen as a curriculum for applying Hermetic principles in practical life, one that his contemporary New Thought colleagues were developing from a more American Protestant starting point.

Atkinson's influence on subsequent Western spirituality is difficult to overstate. The Kybalion alone has never gone out of print and has shaped every subsequent teacher who encountered it.

New Thought Today

New Thought continues in several organized forms. Religious Science, Ernest Holmes's system, operates through the Centers for Spiritual Living, with hundreds of communities worldwide. Unity Church, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, is one of the largest New Thought denominations, with Daily Word magazine reaching millions of readers. Divine Science, founded by Malinda Cramer and Nona Brooks in the 1880s, continues with smaller but active congregations.

Beyond organized religion, New Thought ideas permeate the self-help industry. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937), Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), and Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006) all draw directly or indirectly from New Thought sources, though often without acknowledgment.

The law of attraction movement, which exploded in popularity after The Secret, is essentially a stripped-down version of New Thought teaching, focused primarily on manifestation and prosperity. The philosophical depth and ethical framework of the original movement is often lost in this popularization, but the core conviction remains: what you think and believe shapes what you experience.

New Thought's Cultural Influence

To understand New Thought's cultural influence, consider how many ideas in modern Western culture that seem like common sense or recent psychological insight actually trace to this movement. The idea that attitude shapes outcomes is New Thought. The conviction that beliefs can cause or cure illness has New Thought roots (now partially supported by psychoneuroimmunology). The notion that thoughts are "things" with causal power is New Thought. Even the widespread belief that you "attract" into your life what you focus on most persistently is a New Thought idea.

Positive psychology, the academic study of well-being and flourishing developed by Martin Seligman and others since the 1990s, has arrived at some empirically supported conclusions that New Thought teachers articulated a century earlier, namely that optimism, positive expectancy, and belief in one's ability to change outcomes are associated with better health, greater resilience, and more successful life outcomes. The mechanism New Thought proposed (direct mental causation) may not match the mechanism positive psychology describes (behavioral and neurological), but the observations overlap significantly.