Law of Attraction History - The New Thought Movement (Part 1)

The New Thought Movement became a major philosophical movement in the 1870s in American and the major organizational body, the International New Thought Alliance (INTA) adopted the term “New Thought” by the 1890s. The term is applied to various groups and organizations that share common philosophies, though not all belong to the INTA.

New Thought Origins and Teachers
The movement originated with the teachings of New Hampshire clockmaker Phineas Pankhurst Quimby (1802-1866). Inspired by a performance he saw in 1838 by the French mesmerist Charles Poyen, Quimby set up shop as a magnetizer and toured Maine and New Brunswick with assistant Lucius Burkar. The two diagnosed disease while in a hypnotic trance.

It was during this tour that Quimby came to a number of realizations. First, he noticed that he could heal some people psychically without a spiritual medium. Second, he noticed that Burkar was using simplistic cures (for instance, herb tea against cancer). Quimby put two and two together and came to the radical idea that it was the patient’s belief that the methods worked, not the techniques like psychic healing or herb tea, that cured them. It followed, he deduced, that patients were fully responsible for their own ailments and diseases.

Christian Science founder, Mary Baker Eddy, met Quimby in 1862 and was healed of her chronic “neuralgia in the spine and stomach.” She then mixed his ideology with more traditional Christian beliefs and spread her own interpretation. In 1875, she wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures where she detailed that the universe, as it was created by God is essentially spiritual and good. It’s the human mind that creates the illusion that it is otherwise. Illness is caused by this incorrect belief, but we can cure illness by recognizing that the divine nature lies within us and that we are primarily spiritual beings.

In contrast, Warren Felt Evans (1817-1889) was also healed of a chronic nervous illness in 1863 and went on to teach his own New Thought flavor. Originally a Methodist minister, Evans didn’t see matter (the physical body) as intrinsically evil. It only becomes evil if it becomes dominant and takes over the spirit. Otherwise, it was a neutral material that was shaped by thought.