The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles: A Deep Review

Who Was Wallace Wattles?

Wallace Delois Wattles was born in 1860 in Illinois and spent most of his life in poverty, studying and experimenting with New Thought philosophy. He wrote The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, the same year he published two companion volumes: The Science of Being Great and The Science of Being Well. He died in 1911, one year after his most famous work was published, having finally achieved a degree of the prosperity he had been working toward.

His daughter Florence Wattles wrote that her father "had been a failure for most of his life" and that The Science of Getting Rich was the product of years of study and experimentation, not inherited wisdom. He had been poor, unsuccessful, and discouraged, and the book was his attempt to articulate the principles he had discovered through that long process of testing and refinement. This biographical context matters: Wattles is not writing from the position of someone who was always successful; he is writing from the position of someone who discovered a method that worked after decades of failure.

Wattles was a student of the idealist philosophical tradition, particularly G.W.F. Hegel and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was explicit about these influences, recommending in the preface to The Science of Getting Rich that readers who wished to understand the philosophical foundation of his method should study Hegel and Emerson. This distinguishes him from many New Thought writers who presented the same principles without acknowledging their intellectual roots.

Thinking Stuff: The Metaphysical Foundation

Wattles opens his argument with a statement that might seem absurd to a reader steeped in materialist assumptions but is entirely coherent within the idealist philosophical tradition he is drawing from:

"There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought. Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created."

This is not magical thinking in the dismissive sense. It is a statement of philosophical idealism: the position that consciousness is fundamental and matter is secondary, that the physical world is an expression of mental reality rather than the other way around. This position has been held by some of the greatest philosophers in Western history, from Plato through Berkeley through Hegel, and it finds its most developed expression in the Vedantic tradition of India, which Wattles explicitly acknowledges.

In Hermetic terms, Wattles' "thinking stuff" is the All-Mind of the Kybalion's first principle: "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental." In Vedantic terms, it is Brahman: the infinite, undifferentiated consciousness from which all forms emerge and to which they return. In Neoplatonic terms, it is the One from which all being emanates. Wattles is not inventing a new concept; he is translating an ancient philosophical insight into American vernacular and drawing out its practical implications for financial well-being.

The Certain Way: Three Core Practices

Wattles' "Certain Way" is not a formula or a technique. It is a quality of thinking and acting that, when maintained consistently, creates the conditions for desired outcomes to manifest. He describes three interlocking practices that constitute the Certain Way.

First: the mental image. You must create a clear, vivid mental picture of what you want, held with such consistency that it becomes your dominant mental state. Wattles distinguishes this sharply from daydreaming or wishful thinking: the mental image must be specific, it must be held with gratitude and certainty rather than anxiety and hope, and it must be treated as already real in the realm of formless substance even if not yet visible in physical form.

Second: unwavering faith and gratitude. The mental image must be held with genuine faith, not the forced cheerfulness of someone pretending to believe, but the settled certainty of someone who understands the underlying principle well enough to trust it. Wattles argues that doubt and fear do not just slow the process; they actively reverse it, impressing the doubted and feared conditions on the formless substance just as effectively as faith impresses the desired ones.

Third: efficient and advancing action. Wattles is explicit that mental work alone is not sufficient. You must act, in your current position, with full efficiency, giving more in use value than you take in cash value in every transaction, always moving toward advancement rather than maintaining the status quo. The mental image creates the inner conditions; the action provides the physical channel through which those conditions manifest.

The integration of these three practices is what Wattles calls "the Certain Way." Each is necessary; none is sufficient alone. The person who holds a mental image without gratitude holds it from a place of lack. The person who acts with full efficiency without a clear mental image is working without direction. The person who has both image and faith but does not act provides no physical channel for the formless substance to work through.

Creation vs. Competition: The Key Distinction

One of Wattles' most practically important contributions is his distinction between the competitive plane and the creative plane of thought and action. He argues that competition-based thinking, in which you are trying to get more than others, to take a larger share of existing resources, is fundamentally limited and ultimately self-defeating, even when it succeeds in material terms.

The competitive thinker is always working with a fixed pie. Whatever they gain, someone else loses. This orientation affirms scarcity at the level of consciousness, which means it attracts more experiences of scarcity even as it temporarily accumulates material things. The competitive thinker who wins feels relief, not genuine abundance, because the competitive orientation is never satiated.

The creative thinker works from a different premise: that the formless substance is unlimited, that genuine value added to the world draws equivalent value back to the creator, and that abundance is a natural consequence of aligning with the creative intelligence that underlies all things. The creative thinker does not take from others; they add to the sum total of value available, and in doing so they participate in the limitless creative process of the formless substance itself.

Wattles' practical instruction is to ensure that everything you give, every product, service, interaction, contains more in use value than the cash equivalent you receive. When you give more than you take at the level of genuine value, you are working on the creative plane, and the formless substance responds to this alignment by continuing to create through you.

Gratitude as the Connecting Practice

Wattles assigns gratitude a specific functional role in his system that is often misunderstood when the book is read superficially. He is not recommending gratitude as a pleasant habit or a moral virtue, though it may be both. He is recommending it as a precision instrument for aligning the individual mind with the formless intelligence.

His reasoning is straightforward. The mind can hold only one orientation at a time. If you are genuinely grateful for what you have, you are not simultaneously resenting what you lack. Resentment of lack impresses images of lack on the formless substance. Gratitude for what is present impresses images of abundance. The formless substance, being responsive to thought, moves toward the dominant mental content, and genuine, sustained gratitude keeps the dominant mental content on the side of abundance rather than scarcity.

Wattles is specific about how to practice gratitude: not through rote recitation or mechanical lists, but through genuine, specific acknowledgment of what you actually have and what has actually come to you. He recommends turning the mind toward gratitude many times each day, particularly in the moments between sleep and waking (a threshold state where the subconscious mind is most receptive) and in any moment when the mind begins to slide toward resentment, fear, or comparison with others.

This gratitude practice connects Wattles' system to a universal contemplative instruction found across traditions. The Sufi tradition prescribes continuous remembrance of God (dhikr) as the fundamental spiritual practice. The Buddhist tradition prescribes the cultivation of mudita (sympathetic joy) as an antidote to the comparative mind. The Stoic tradition prescribes the regular contemplation of what would be lost to generate gratitude for what is present. In each case, the instruction is the same: align the mind with what is present and good, rather than with what is absent and feared.

The Mental Image and the Formless Substance

Chapter 11, "Acting in the Certain Way," contains Wattles' most specific instruction about the mental image exercise. He recommends taking time each day, he suggests half an hour, though he acknowledges even a few focused minutes are valuable, to build and hold the mental picture of what you want with full vividness.

He is precise about the quality of attention required. The image must not be held with straining effort; it must be held with relaxed certainty. It must not be accompanied by worry about whether it will manifest; it must be accompanied by gratitude for the fact that it is already real in the formless substance and is now becoming real in physical form. The distinction between these two qualities of attention is the difference between the competitive and creative planes: strained, anxious holding of the image impresses the anxiety on the formless substance; relaxed, grateful holding impresses the image itself.

This is a subtle but important distinction that takes time and practice to internalize. Most people, when they try to hold a mental image of what they want, find that the image comes with a freight of anxiety about whether it will happen. Wattles' instruction is to separate the image from the anxiety, to hold the image in the same quality of certainty with which you hold the mental image of your own name, a thing so thoroughly known and trusted that no anxiety accompanies its use.

Action and Efficiency: The Physical Channel

Wattles' treatment of action is one of the most practically useful aspects of The Science of Getting Rich and distinguishes him from New Thought writers who allowed mental work to substitute for physical action. He is emphatic: "You must act now."

His instruction is to act with full efficiency and advancement in your current position, whatever it is. If you are doing work you want to leave, do it as excellently as possible while working toward the next position. Give more value than you receive in every interaction. Advance in every situation rather than merely maintaining. This is not about working harder; it is about bringing the full creative intelligence of the Certain Way into every action, so that each action is an expression of the creative mind rather than the competitive one.

Wattles' concept of "advancing" is worth dwelling on. He does not mean promotion or financial increase, though these may follow. He means moving toward the expression of your fullest capacities in every context, the opposite of going through the motions or doing just enough. The person who acts with full advancement is continuously impressing the creative pattern on the formless substance through their physical actions, providing the channel through which the mental image can manifest.

Hegel, Vedanta, and the Philosophy Behind the Method

Wattles is unusual among New Thought writers in making his philosophical sources explicit. He recommends that readers who want to understand the basis of his method study Hegel and Emerson, and he describes his system as based on "the monistic theory of the cosmos," specifically the Hindu teaching that "One is All, and that All is One."

G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy begins from the premise that absolute Spirit (Geist) is the fundamental reality of which all particular things are expressions. The history of the world is the history of Spirit becoming conscious of itself through finite minds. Individual human consciousness is not separate from this absolute Spirit; it is Spirit in the process of recognizing itself. When Wattles describes impressing thoughts on the formless thinking substance, he is working within a Hegelian framework: individual thought participating in and shaping the universal intelligence.

The Vedantic teaching of Advaita (non-duality), associated particularly with Shankara, holds that Brahman, the unlimited, formless, consciousness-as-such, is the only reality, and that the world of forms is its expression, neither separate from Brahman nor absolutely identical with it. The individual self (atman) is, at its deepest level, identical with Brahman. When Wattles describes the formless thinking substance as both the source of all things and as responsive to the impressions of individual thought, he is making a claim that sits comfortably within this Vedantic framework.

Emerson's contribution is the practical American synthesis of these two great streams. His essay "The Over-Soul" describes the individual mind's participation in a universal consciousness: "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE." Wattles draws this Emersonian inheritance into his practical method, translating the mystical language of the Over-Soul into the pragmatic language of the Certain Way.

The Secret and Wattles' Legacy

Rhonda Byrne's 2006 film and book The Secret brought Law of Attraction teaching to a global audience of hundreds of millions. Byrne has stated in interviews that reading The Science of Getting Rich was the catalyst for her entire project: she experienced reading it as a revelation and became determined to trace the "secret" it contained back through history and present it to a contemporary audience.

The central teaching of The Secret, that sustained mental focus on desired outcomes attracts them into your life, is Wattles' Certain Way, simplified. The aspects that Byrne simplified out are, unfortunately, the most important ones: Wattles' explicit philosophical foundation (Hegel, Vedanta, Emerson), his insistence on the creative rather than competitive plane of action, and his clear, repeated instruction that mental work must be integrated with efficient physical action. The Secret created the impression that mental focus alone produces results; Wattles never taught this.

For serious students of manifestation teaching, returning to the source, reading Wattles directly, produces a more complete and more practically useful understanding than any popularization can provide. The Science of Getting Rich is freely available through Project Gutenberg, and the Tarcher/Penguin edition provides it in a well-presented modern format.

About the Book

The Science of Getting Rich

by Wallace D. Wattles

Tarcher/Penguin | ASIN: 1585426016

The 1910 New Thought classic that directly inspired The Secret. Published in this Tarcher/Penguin edition with a contemporary introduction. Also freely available through Project Gutenberg for those who prefer the unaltered original text.

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