Chapter 15

So Kant ended what Spinoza began, by reaffirming the creative power of the mind itself. It does far more than passively receive, it interprets, organizes, contributes, creates. True enough, it is not an unconditioned creator, it has laws of its own in obedience to which it finds both its freedom and its power. It must take the material which experience supplies and yet, in its higher ranges, in the regions of conduct and faith, that is, where conscience has become the guide and the necessities of the soul the law, we do possess the power in enfranchising obediences and splendid adventures of faith to make a world rich in goodness, power and peace. And here, once more, there is a strangely modern note. Life is a pilgrim's progress. We are set out to discover "whether there might be some real good, the discovery and attainment of which would enable us to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness." And we do possess the power within ourselves, if only we may discover the controlling laws and release effective forces, to come at least a stage nearer our goal. All this makes for that exaltation of the creative self which is so marked a characteristic of present-day attitudes and which is perhaps the distinctive affirmation of New Thought.

_Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism the Practical Outcome of a Great Movement_

But it needed time for all this to work itself out. The philosophic basis for it had been supplied but it is a far cry from philosophy to the practical conduct of life. Kant's transcendental philosophy needed a deal of working over before it became practicable for the man in the street. And to begin with what was deepest in the philosophy of the Enlightenment led in unexpected directions. "While the practical tendencies of all speculative thought inevitably appear in the opinions and customs of a general public far removed from their sources, it is particularly true of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, that its influences had no small part in shaping the popular point of view concerning the moral, religious and political convictions of that age."[61] Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism were, says Hibben, the popular and practical outcome of the whole movement,--Utilitarianism in Ethics, Deism in Religion, Individualism in Politics. These three growths--and they have borne a deal of bitter fruit in the last one hundred years--grow out of one soil. In general they are due to Locke's sensationalism, Hume's skepticism, a new emphasis upon reason as opposed to revelation and the self-sufficiency of the individual. If conscious life is nothing but sensation worked over and built up, then pleasurable sensations are the best we can aspire to, happiness is the end of the quest. So Utilitarianism defined goodness in terms of happiness and gave to conduct generally a grasping, greedy quality for which we have paid over and over again in the disappointments and disillusionments of an age, which, supposing itself to have discovered the true secret of well-being, found too much of its seeming happiness only Dead Sea fruit.

[Footnote 61: Hibben, "The Philosophy of the Enlightenment," p. 253.]

_They Bear a Bitter Fruit: the Reactions Against Them_

Deism in its reaction against Religion as merely revelation and in its endeavour to find a rational basis for faith set God apart from His world, detached, unheeding and offering no real recourse to a travailing humanity between whom and Himself it built a rigid fabric of impersonal law. The Individualism of the eighteenth century was partly a reaction against old despotisms of Church and State--and a Declaration of Independence. It was in part a pride of accomplishment and a new affirmation of the self-sufficiency of the questing reason. There was in it also a sound recognition of the worth of personality of which the world then stood in need and which has since supplied a foundation for a saving passion for education and human well-being. But Individualism as practically applied by the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century--unexpectedly reinforced as it was by aspects of Darwinism--stressed the right of the strong and the doom of the weak. It made competition the law of economic development, the survival of the fittest the goal of a life of struggle.

Consciously or unconsciously the politics, industry and religion of the nineteenth century were greatly influenced by these outstanding conceptions. No need to say how utterly they have broken down. They have made for the deepening strife of classes and of nations, they have essentially defeated the bright promise of a time which seemed to have more to hope for than almost any other great period of history.

And yet they were never unchallenged. They were challenged by the essential spirit of Christianity; they were challenged by the poets who found that they could shape no songs out of such stuff as this; they were challenged by philosophers who sought to build for themselves and for us a world more free and true; they were challenged by a group of great novelists who created out of the wealth of their imagination characters and situations in which love and human worth had their way in spite of a thousand obstacles. They were challenged by prophets of a better world, the Ruskins and Carlyles who soundly rated the ethics of selfishness and the political economies of competition and the politics of self-assertion and who stirred deeply the more sensitive of their time. And finally they were challenged, and here we begin to approach again the genesis of New Thought, by a philosophic movement which found its point of departure in certain great aspects of earlier thinking which had been much obscured by the difficult forms in which it had been stated: the supremacy, that is, of the soul over all its surroundings.

Now this return to what we may call the creative and controlling power of spiritual forces is the key to the modern approach to life. We do not understand, it may be, the meaning of our own terms. Spirit is a vague enough word but we do know that the initiative is with desire and purpose and understanding. These are positive and masterful; they are by no means free; they are conditioned by the vaster order of which they are a part, none the less our human world is plastic to their touch and our material world as well. Carlyle has chanted all this gustily enough but there is kindling truth in his stormy music. "Thus, like some wild flaming, wild thundering train of heaven's artillery does this mysterious mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas filled up in our passage. Can the earth which is but dead in a vision resist spirits which have reality and are alive?"

_New England Transcendentalism. Quimby Again and the Dressers_

Curiously enough this quotation from a book which nowadays nobody likely reads save perhaps in some college course on early Victorian literature, brings us within sight of the beginnings of New Thought. A little group of English and American thinkers, part philosophers, part poets, part rebels against the established order, anticipated trained students in their return upon the higher and more positive side of an older philosophy. They made much of the inner life, its powers and its possibilities; they affirmed the creative power of the soul; they conceived life to lie plastic to the touch of vision and desire; they thought themselves to be standing upon the threshold of a new world. They were impatient of discipline; they dreamed impossible things and gave their dreams the authority of reality. They were hard enough to understand and they sorely tried practical plodding folk, but they kindled their time and released forces which are yet in action.

New England, through a group of adventurous thinkers of whom Emerson was the most distinguished, responded strongly to Transcendentalism. Another group, as has been said, responded strongly to mesmerism and spiritism, which were also a part of the ferment of the time in which Christian Science and New Thought (I use New Thought here in the technical sense) find their source. And finally, Quimby, who is a rather unexpectedly important link in a long chain,--important, that is, to the student of modern cults--reacted against mesmerism, felt and thought his way toward some understanding of the force of suggestion in abnormal states, applied his conclusion to faith and mental healing and gathered about him--as has been said before--a little group of disciples who have between them released far-reaching movements.

Mrs. Eddy and the Dressers were the outstanding members of this little group of disciples. Mrs. Eddy soon dissociated herself from the others and she supplied in "Science and Health" a distinctive philosophy to her movement. She organized it into a church; she imposed upon it a distinctive discipline. No little of the power of Christian Science is due to this narrow rigidity which is itself the projection of the personality of Mary Baker Eddy. But Christian Science did not carry with it the whole of the group which had come under Quimby's influence, nor indeed all of those who came under Mary Baker Eddy's influence. There was during all the formative period of these modern cults a perpetual process of schism.

We have as a result, then, two divergent movements related in underground ways, though as marked in difference as in resemblance, both of them beginning about the same time, both of them reactions against accepted religious forces and validations, both of them with a marked therapeutic content, both of them adventures in the conduct of life.

In the summary which follows I am in debt to Dresser's recent "History of the New Thought Movement." The name New Thought was chosen as the title of a little magazine devoted to mental healing, published in 1894 in Melrose, Mass. "The term became current in Boston through the organization of the Metaphysical Club in 1895. About the same time it was used by Mr. C.P. Patterson in his magazine _Mind_ and in the title of two of his books." Other names were suggested--in England, Higher Thought; in Boston, Higher Life; in New York the little group was for a time known as the Circle of Divine Ministry; in the west the movement was known as Divine Science or Practical Christianity. There were groups also which called themselves the Home of Truth or the Society of Silent Unity.

_New Thought Takes Form_

New Thought, as has been said, lacks the definite direction which Christian Science has always had. Its organizations have grown up quietly, more or less irregularly and have had always a shifting character. "The first New Thought Society with a regular leader and organization in Boston was the Church of the Higher Life established in 1894."[62] The Metaphysical Club was an outgrowth of the New Thought group in Boston. Dresser gives a list of the original members, chiefly significant through the presence among them of some of Quimby's disciples and others whose books have since held a high place in New Thought literature. There were manifest connections between the movement and liberal (particularly Unitarian) theology.

[Footnote 62: All citations in this section are from Dresser's "History of New Thought," unless otherwise indicated.]

The first New Thought convention was held in Boston in 1899 (there had been earlier conventions of the Disciples of Divine Science--a related movement--in western cities) and the second in New York City in 1900. The New York convention was the first to make any general statement of the "purposes" of the League. We find on the New York program one Swami Abhedananda, lecturer on the Vedanta philosophy. Here is an early indication of the return of Eastern religions upon the West which is also one of the marked characteristics of the religious development of our time. We do not need to follow through in detail the list of successive conventions with their topics and their speakers. The group is not so large but that the same names reappear. There are marked attempts in the earlier conventions to associate leaders in recognized schools of philosophy and theology with the movement. One does not discover this tendency in the later convention lists.

The local groups throughout the country have had varying fortunes. They have from time to time changed their names and naturally their leaders. The west has responded perhaps more strongly than the Atlantic seaboard. The movement is particularly strong on the Pacific Coast. There are no available statistics and generalizations are of doubtful value. The Cincinnati and Kansas City groups are offered by Dresser as typical organizations, but they seem on the whole to be exceptional rather than typical. The strength of the New Thought movement is not in its organization but in its influence. "In England as in America interest was aroused by Christian Science, then came a gradual reaction and the establishment of independent branches of the movement." "It is difficult," says Dresser, "to obtain information pertaining to the influence of New Thought literature in foreign languages." The more significant New Thought books, however, have been variously translated and widely sold. New Thought leaders sometimes advise their disciples to retain their old church associations and the movement has naturally tended to merge in religious liberalism generally and to become only an aspect of the manifold religious gropings of a troubled time.

In the Constitution and By-Laws of the New Thought Alliance, published in 1916, the purposes of the society are "to teach the infinitude of the Supreme One, Divinity of Man and his Infinite possibilities through the creative power of constructive thinking and obedience to the voice of the Indwelling Presence which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health and Prosperity." We discover here the same tendency toward the deification of capital letters which we have already noted in Christian Science.

_Its Creeds_

In 1917 the International New Thought Alliance went further than at any other time before in the direction of a creed and set forth the following series of affirmations: "We affirm the freedom of each soul as to choice and as to belief, and would not, by the adoption of any declaration of principles, limit such freedom. The essence of the New Thought is Truth, and each individual must be loyal to the Truth he sees. The windows of his soul must be kept open at each moment for the higher light, and his mind must be always hospitable to each new inspiration.

"We affirm the Good. This is supreme, universal and everlasting. Man is made in the image of the Good, and evil and pain are but the tests and correctives that appear when his thought does not reflect the full glory of this image.

"We affirm health, which is man's divine inheritance. Man's body is his holy temple. Every function of it, every cell of it, is intelligent, and is shaped, ruled, repaired, and controlled by mind. He whose body is full of light is full of health. Spiritual healing has existed among all races in all times. It has now become a part of the higher science and art of living the life more abundant.

"We affirm the divine supply. He who serves God and man in the full understanding of the law of compensation shall not lack. Within us are unused resources of energy and power. He who lives with his whole being, and thus expresses fullness, shall reap fullness in return. He who gives himself, he who knows, and acts in his highest knowledge, he who trusts in the divine return, has learned the law of success.

"We affirm the teaching of Christ that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we are one with the Father, that we should judge not, that we should love one another, that we should heal the sick, that we should return good for evil, that we should minister to others, and that we should be perfect even as our Father in Heaven is perfect. These are not only ideals, but practical, every-day working principles.

"We affirm the new thought of God as Universal Love, Life, Truth, and Joy, in whom we live, move and have our being, and by whom we are held together; that His mind is our mind now, that realizing our oneness with Him means love, truth, peace, health and plenty, not only in our own lives but in the giving out of these fruits of the Spirit to others.

"We affirm these things, not as a profession, but practice, not in one day of the week, but in every hour and minute of every day, sleeping and waking, not in the ministry of the few, but in a service that includes the democracy of all, not in words alone, but in the innermost thoughts of the heart expressed in living the life. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.'

"We affirm Heaven here and now, the life everlasting that becomes conscious immortality, the communion of mind with mind throughout the universe of thought, the nothingness of all error and negation, including death, the variety of unity that produces the individual expressions of the One-Life, and the quickened realization of the indwelling God in each soul that is making a new heaven and a new earth."

We discover in this creed a more distinct recognition of ideals and truths which inherited Christianity supplied than in the earlier statements of purpose. In the annual address of the President there is distinct reference to the relation of the New Thought gospel to the churches. "I am asked often: What is the relation of this movement to the Church? This is not a new religion. It is not an institution seeking to build itself up for the mere sake of the institution. We do not ask anybody to leave the church. We ask them to become better members of their churches than before. New Thought is designed to make people better and more efficient in whatever relation of life they may find themselves. In other words: 'New Thought teaches men and women only the old common-sense doctrine of self-reliance and belief in the integrity of the universe and of one's own soul. It dignifies and ennobles manhood and womanhood.' The main idea on which Christianity is founded is that of communion with God, that of worshipping God in spirit and in truth. This is the very corner-stone of those modern movements that recognize men and women as the living temples of the God within.... I predict that this new interpretation and new understanding will become universal in the new age which is now dawning."

A further paragraph, however, reveals the synthetic character of the movement. "It is the realization in practical affairs of the teachings not only of the Nazarene, but of every other great religious teacher since the world began; for in their essence these teachings are fundamentally alike; and the New Thought and other new spiritual movements are but the efforts to apply, in our relations one with another, these simple and sublime truths."

_The Range of the Movement_

I have quoted at length from these programs, affirmations and this one address to indicate the range of the movement as it has found official expression. We must look, however, to the literature of the movement as a whole for a full understanding of its reach and influence. The literature in general falls into three classes: (1) books concerned mostly about healing; (2) books which instruct as to character, spiritual states and fullness of life; (3) what one may call success books which apply New Thought to business and the practical conduct of life. The lines of demarcation between these three types of books is, of course, not clear and there is a material which is common to all of them, but the distinction thus suggested is real.

As a principle of healing New Thought differs from Christian Science in almost the whole range of its assumptions. It does not deny the reality of matter, not the reality of suffering, nor does it distinguish, as does Christian Science, between the Divine Mind and the mortal mind. There are, according to New Thought, healing forces which may be trusted to do their remedial work in us, if only we surrender ourselves to them and let them have their way. There is nothing in New Thought which quite corresponds to the "demonstration" of Christian Science. It would seem to an impartial observer that Christian Science asks of its disciples an intensity of positive effort which New Thought does not demand. Dresser, for example, believes all suffering to be the result of struggle. Directly we cease to struggle we cease to suffer, provided, of course, that our cessation is in the direction of relaxation and a trust in a higher power. In some regions, however, Christian Science and New Thought as therapeutic agents work along the same line, but where Christian Science denies New Thought ignores. Here New Thought makes more use of psychological laws; it follows James generally in its psychology, as it follows Emerson in its thought of the over-soul, though in this region Emerson's detached serenity of faith is given body in an insistence upon the divine immanence for which New Thought is in debt to the suggestions and analogies of modern science.

New Thought makes much of the shifting of attention and its disciplines are rather the disciplines of the mystic than the disciplines of the Christian Scientist. It seeks in substance to ascertain the laws of mind in action and then, through the utilization of this knowledge, to secure health, happiness and prosperity. It makes much, of course, of the centrality of mind both in well-being and pain. It hardly goes so far as to say that pain is an error in belief, but it does say that pain is a matter of consciousness and that as we are masters of consciousness we are masters of pain. It believes in thought transference and absent treatment, but it is perhaps more conservative in the cases which it is willing to undertake than Christian Science and recognizes the limitations of the healer.

_The Key-Words of New Thought_

Its key-words are Harmony, Realization, Affirmation and Poise. Just here New Thought is a strangely interwoven web. It makes much of "vibration" and "friction." It is evidently under the spell of the wave theory of light and heat. It is most dependable in its analysis and application of laws of mental action, most undependable in trying to account for the relation of mind to body and in its explanation of the physical phenomena of disease. Fatigue, for example, "is evidently due to the calling of power into a new direction. It [evidently the power] comes into contact with dense matter, with an uncultivated portion of the being, physical as well as mental, and meeting with resistance friction of some sort is the natural result." One has only to compare a statement like that with Cannon's careful study of bodily changes under emotional states, to see the difference between speculation controlled by analogy and the illuminating experimental methods of modern science.

When Dresser adds that "we shall eliminate disease not by fighting it, not by studying its causes, or doctoring its physical effects, but by seeing the wisdom of the better way," he is on dangerous ground, for if we are not to study the causes of disease but to take as our guide the serene generalizations of a speculative mind we are shutting in our faces one of the doors by which we enter into that knowledge of the mind of God, of which New Thought makes so much. How shall we know the mind of God except as we ask endless patient and careful questions of every revelation of the divine method, whether in sickness or health?