New Thought has been defined as "an attitude of mind, not a cult." It is
really both. It is necessary to include it in this study because it is a
cult; it is hard justly to appraise it because it is an attitude of
mind. Attitudes of mind are as elusive as the play of light on running
water. We can estimate their force and direction only as we have an
understanding of the main currents of thought by which they are carried
along and as far as New Thought goes these main currents are far older
than the cult itself.
_New Thought Difficult to Define; "An Attitude of Mind, Not a Cult"_
New Thought has never had an apostolic succession or a rigid discipline
or a centralized organic form. This has given to it a baffling looseness
in every direction, but has, on the other hand, given it a pervasive
quality which Christian Science does not possess. It has a vast and
diffuse literature and so merges into the general movement of
contemporaneous thought as to make it difficult to find anywhere a
distinct demarcation of channels.
New Thought is either a theology with a philosophic basis or a
philosophy with a theological bias. It is centrally and quite distinctly
an attempt to give a religious content to the present trend of science
and philosophy, a reaction against old theologies and perhaps a kind of
nebula out of which future theologies will be organized. For a great
theology is always the systematic organization of a complex of forces, a
massive structure wrought through the years by manifold builders
subduing a rich variety of material to their purposes.
The teaching of the Scriptures, old traditions, the needs of worship and
organization, political and social circumstances, changing moral ideals,
the trend of philosophies and sciences, the challenge of schisms and
heresies, the sanctifying power of blind custom and the mystical
authority of the Church itself all combine to make a theology. Once a
great theology is so constituted it possesses an immense power over
life. It shapes character and ideals and gives direction to faith,
orders effort and so becomes, as it were, a mould into which souls and
societies are cast.
Theologies may be changed, in fact they are always in the way of being
changed, but they yield slowly to transforming forces. Nothing is so
persistent as organized faith and yet the very strength of a great
theology is always its weakness. It is never really anything else than a
crystallization of past forces. The experiences which voice themselves
in theology have cooled and hardened down; the philosophy which is
implicit in theology is past philosophy; the science implicit in
theology is senescent science.
There is always in evidence, then, in the regions of theology a
disturbing pressure occasioned by the reaction of contemporaneous
movements in science and philosophy and understandings of life generally
upon these old and solidly established inherited forms. Currents of
thought are always, as it were, running past the great formulae since
thought is free and formulae are rigid, and then returning upon them.
From time to time this movement gathers great force. The old has been
rigid so long, the new is so insistent that the conflict between them
fills an age with its clamour, stresses souls to its travail, breaks
down ancient forms without immediately building up their equivalent, and
contributes uncertainties and restlessnesses everywhere in evidence.
Now this is exactly what has been happening in the region of religion in
the last thirty years. An inherited order, strongly fashioned and
organized and long essentially unchanged, has been compelled to take
account of the forces about it. Certainly theology is not so static as
an earlier paragraph would seem to indicate, none the less the great
theological centralities do possess an immense power of resistance. We
have already seen how little Protestantism had changed since the
Reformation until it met the full impact of modern science and
philosophy. We have had really until our own time and still largely
continue a theology with the Creation story of the ancient Hebrews, the
outlook upon life of the age of the Apostles, the philosophy of the
Greek fathers, St. Augustine's conception of human nature and the
expectation of the end of the world and the issues of history of the
Jewish apocalypse given a Christian interpretation.
True enough, there are in all this precious and timeless qualities but
there is also through all the fabric of our formulated faith the
interweaving of such understandings as those who shaped our creeds had,
of law and history and truth. Any far-reaching change, then, in
philosophy or science was bound to profoundly affect religion and even
forty years ago far-reaching modifications of the old order were
overdue.
New Thought is just one outcome of the tremendous impact of
contemporaneous thought upon our inherited theology; a detached fragment
or rather group of fragments, for even as a cult New Thought, as has
been said, is loosely organized and its varying parts have in common
only a common drift. Yet that drift is significant for it has beneath it
the immense force of a philosophy which has been gathering head for more
than a century. It is to this, therefore, that we ought to address
ourselves for any understanding of the changed outlook upon life which
is carried, as it were, from the surface of profounder tides.
_"The Rediscovery of the Inner Life"_
Josiah Royce dismisses the whole of philosophy from Spinoza to Kant in
one single pregnant phrase. He calls it "the rediscovery of the inner
life." It is along this line that modern philosophy and religion
approach each other. Religion has always been the setting forth of the
inner life in terms of its relationship to God and the proofs of the
reality of religion have always been found in the experiences of the
soul. The mystic particularly made everything of the inner life; he
lived only in its realities. For the sake of its enrichment and its
empowerment he subjected himself to rigorous disciplines. Its
revelations were to him all sufficient, for having found God therein he
asked for nothing beside.
Wherein, then, is this new mysticism, or better, this new cult of the
inner life different from the old? It is not easy to answer that
question in a paragraph, though it is easy to feel the answer in any
comparison of the great classics of mysticism--which are mostly
spiritual autobiographies--and New Thought literature. To turn from St.
Augustine to Dresser, or from St. Theresa to Trine is to change
spiritual and intellectual climates. There is in the modern literature
little reflection of such spiritual struggle as fills the great
Confessions with the agony of embattled souls, nor any resolution of
such struggle into the peace of a soul "fully awake as regards God but
wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of
herself." This testimony of St. Theresa is illuminating as a contrasting
background for New Thought. There the soul is very much awake, both as
regards things of this world and in respect of herself.
These new cults of the inner life are far more self-conscious than the
old and far more self-analytical. They seek to discern the laws in
answer to which they act and utilize those laws in the practical conduct
of life. They are always either appealing to underlying philosophies or
else trying to make a philosophy of their own. Mysticism made
everything of God and nothing of itself. It plotted its mystic way but
knew nothing of psychology. New Thought seeks to discover in psychology
a road to God. The centers of mysticism were emotional; the centers of
New Thought are intellectual. All these cults are far more akin to
Gnosticism than mysticism, though they are saved, yet not wholly, from
the lawlessness of Gnosticism by a pretty constant return to the
outstanding conclusions of science and philosophy.
_Spinoza's Quest_
Now if we seek to discover the real genesis of the movement and trace
its development we would better begin, so deep are the roots of things,
with Spinoza rather than Quimby. Here the deeper currents, upon the
surface of which New Thought moves, take their rise and here also we
return to Royce's phrase--"the rediscovery of the inner life"--and the
philosopher who inaugurated the philosophic quest for just this
discovery.
Spinoza was one of the last of the mystics and the first of the modern
philosophers. He shared with the mystics of an earlier time a consuming
sense of the futility of life save as life perfected itself in
contemplations of an eternal excellency and communion with something far
greater than itself. "After experience had taught me," he says (and this
is quoted from Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy"), "that all the
usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that none
of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good
or bad except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally
resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which would
affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether there
might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me
to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness."
Now there is in all this a strangely modern note--dissatisfaction with
what is offered by the commonplace and the accepted, a great emphasis
upon the mind as the key to the readjustments of life, a quest for some
single formula which would offer "continuous, supreme and unending
happiness." This is exactly what Mary Baker Eddy and all the other
perplexed and bodily broken "seekers" who gathered about Quimby were
really wanting and this is what, for one reason or another, the
proffered religious experiences of their time failed to secure them.
"This was, then," to quote Royce, "the beginning of Spinoza's Pilgrim's
Progress." (As indeed it is the beginning of every Pilgrim's Progress.)
"But now, for what distinguishes him from other mystics and makes him a
philosopher and not a mere exhorter, he has his religious passion, he
must reflect upon it ... the philosopher must justify his faith."
We have no need here to follow Spinoza along all the way, difficult and
misty enough, by which he sought to justify his faith. The outstanding
fact is enough. He is a mystic who reasons his way through where the
elder mystic has felt his way through, and the goal which he finally
reaches, though it be the goal which the earlier mystics had found by
other roads,--the loss of self in God--is none the less such an
achievement of reason as Spinoza was able to compass.
_Kant Reaffirms the Creative Power of Mind_
So this polisher of lenses bequeathed to the century which followed him
its greatest inheritance and set for it its greatest task: the inner
life as the supreme concern of the philosopher and the discovery of its
laws and the interpretations of its realities the supreme task of
philosophy. Those who continued his work began far enough, apparently,
from the point where he left off and went a road strangely remote from
his. Having taken the inner life for their study they sought to lay bare
its very foundations. Nowadays, if we are so minded, we dictate to
machines which write our words curiously enough in shallow lines upon
wax cylinders and when the cylinders are full shave off the fragile
record and begin again.
This is what the eighteenth century did for the mind. It reduced it to a
virgin surface, it affirmed the reality of nothing except the
impressions thereupon registered by what sense supplied. We owe to
experience and to experience only "all that vast store which the busy
and boundless fancy of man has painted on it [the white paper of the
mind] with an almost endless variety." We have nothing with which to
begin but sensation; we have nothing to go on with but reflection.
"These two, namely external, material things as the objects of
sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of
reflection, are the only originals from whence all our ideas take their
beginnings."[60] Such things as these are perhaps enough to begin with,
but they are not enough to go on with as our thinkers soon enough
discover. Some way must be found to relate the material thus supplied
and to build it up into a glowing, continuous, reasonable and conscious
inner life.
[Footnote 60: Locke, "Essay Concerning the Human Understanding."]
So in turn the philosophers laboured at their problem. They made much
not only of reflection but of association; they found a place for memory
and imagination; they discovered that we may as truly define experience
in terms of ideas as of sensation; they discovered finally that by no
possible process even of the most ingenious reasoning can you get the
full wealth of life out of a mind which was nothing more to begin with
than a piece of white paper, any more than you can get Hamlet (if we may
suppose Shakespeare to have used a dictaphone) out of a wax cylinder, a
needle and a diaphragm.
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?
New Thought, however, takes a far more constructive view of suffering
than Christian Science. For New Thought suffering is at least
disciplinary and instructive: it compels reflection: it brings us to a
knowledge of the law. It is certainly, therefore, just and it may be
kind. Indeed, New Thought occasionally goes so far as to say that
suffering is also a revelation of love and must be so accepted and
entertained. Its general conclusions in this region are far more safe
than its insistence upon vibration and friction and its spacious
technicalities.
When Dresser says that there is a difference "between ignoring a
trouble, between neglecting to take proper care of ourselves and that
wise direction of thought which in no way hinders while it most surely
helps to remedy our ills," he is on perfectly safe ground. When he adds
that there is a strong reason for believing that "there is a simple,
natural way out of every trouble, that kind nature, which is another
name for an omniscient God, is ever ready to do her utmost for us" he is
speaking with a wise and direct helpfulness, though here as generally
New Thought errs on the side of too great a simplification. There is a
way out of every trouble but it is not always simple, it is often
laborious and challenging. We have accomplished marvels in the matter of
tropical sanitation but the way out has been anything but simple. It has
involved experimentations which cost the lives of physicians who offered
themselves for humanity as nobly as any soldier on any battlefield; it
involved the sweat of hard driven labour digging drainage ditches, the
rebuilding of the foundations of cities and a thousand cares and
safeguards. If New Thought wishes to dismiss such a process as this with
the single adjective "simple" it may do as it pleases, but this is not
simplicity as the dictionary defines it.
_Its Field of Real Usefulness_
All that way of thinking of which New Thought is just one aspect is
fatally open to criticism just here. It ignores the immense travail of
humanity in its laborious pilgrimage toward better things and it is far
too ready to proclaim short-cuts to great goals when there never have
been and never will be any short-cuts in life. None the less, trust and
quietness of mind and soul and utter openness to healing, saving forces
are immense healing agents and in its emphasis thereupon New Thought has
recalled us to that which in the very intensity of life's battles we are
in the way of forgetting. And beyond doubt, in that obscure range of
diseases which are due to the want of balanced life--to worry, fear,
self-absorption and over-strain--the methods of New Thought have a
distinct value.
In general, as one follows the history and literature of New Thought one
finds that, though it began with a group more interested in healing than
anything else, healing has come to play a progressively less important
part in the development of the movement and the larger part of its
literature deals with what one might call perhaps the laws of mental
and spiritual hygiene. The principles implicit in New Thought as a
healing cult carry of their own weight into other regions. It is
important enough to get well--that goes without saying--but it is more
important to keep well. Good health on the whole is a kind of
by-product. We suffer as distinctly from spiritual and mental
maladjustments as from physical. We suffer also from the sense of
inadequacy, the sense, that is, of a burdening disproportion between our
own powers and the challenge of life. New Thought has addressed itself
increasingly to such states and problems as this. Here it ceases to be a
cult or a method of healing and has become a most considerable influence
and here also it in general takes the direction of and is identified
with what is truest in the Christian religion, what is sanest and most
clear visioned in present-day thinking. The typical books just here are
Trine's "In Tune with the Infinite" and a similar literature.
_Its Gospel of Getting On_
Another application of New Thought is in the direction of personal
efficiency. There is a considerable literature in this region. It does
not specifically call itself New Thought but it is saturated with the
New Thought fundamentals and has distinctly the New Thought outlook.
Marden is the most popular and prolific writer in this connection and
the titles of his books are suggestive--"Keeping Fit," "Selling Things,"
"The Victorious Attitude," "Training for Efficiency," "Getting On,"
"Self-Investment," "Be Good to Yourself," "He Can Who Thinks He Can,"
"Character," "Opportunity," "An Iron Will." Something like this has, of
course, been done before but the modern efficiency literature moves
along a wider front than earlier books and makes a fuller use of the new
psychology. All this literature dwells strongly upon the driving power
of a self-assertive personality strongly controlled by will, single
visioned and master of its own powers. It suggests lines of approach by
which other people's wills can be overcome, their interest aroused or
their cooeperation secured.
Quotation is almost impossible--there is such an abundance of material
and much of it is commonplace. It takes a deal of padding to make
shelves of books out of the familiar and generally accepted truisms
which are the "Sermon on the Mount" and the "Beatitudes" of this gospel
of personal efficiency. Keep fit, keep at it, assert yourself, never
admit the possibility of failure, study your own strength and weakness
and the strength and weakness of your competitor and success is yours.
Look persistently on the bright side of every situation, refuse to dwell
on the dark side, recognize no realities but harmony, health, beauty and
success.
It is only just to say that success is generously defined and the
disciples of this New Thought are asked also to live in the finer
senses--the recognition of beauty and friendship and goodness, that
is--but on the whole the ideal character so defined is a buoyant
optimist who sells his goods, succeeds in his plans and has his own way
with the world. It is the apotheosis of what James called "The Religion
of Healthy-Mindedness"; it all fits easily into the dominant temper of
our time and seems to reconcile that serving of two masters, God and
Getting On, which a lonely teacher long ago thought quite impossible.
Naturally such a movement has a great following of disciples who
doubtless "have their reward." So alluring a gospel is sure to have its
own border-land prophets and one only has to study the advertisements in
the more generally read magazines to see to what an extent all sorts of
short-cuts to success of every sort are being offered, and how generally
all these advertisements lock up upon two or three principles which
revolve around self-assertion as a center and getting-on as a creed. It
would be idle to underestimate the influence of all this or, indeed, to
cry down the usefulness of it. There is doubtless a tonic quality in
these applications of New Thought principles of which despondent,
hesitating and wrongly self-conscious people stand greatly in need.
_The Limitations and Dangers of Its Positions_
But there is very great danger in it all of minimizing the difficulties
which really lie in the way of the successful conduct of life,
difficulties which are not eliminated because they are denied. And there
is above all the very great danger of making far too little of that
patient and laborious discipline which is the only sound foundation upon
which real power can possibly be established. There is everywhere here
an invitation to the superficial and, above all, there is everywhere
here a tendency toward the creation of a type of character by no means
so admirable in the actual outcome of it as it seems to be in the
glowing pages of these prophets of success. Self-assertion is after all
a very debatable creed, for self-assertion is all too likely to bring us
into rather violent collisions with the self-assertions of others and to
give us, after all, a world of egoists whose egotism is none the less
mischievous, though it wear the garment of sunny cheerfulness and
proclaim an unconquerable optimism.
But at any rate New Thought, in one form or another, has penetrated
deeply the whole fabric of the modern outlook upon life. A just
appraisal of it is not easy and requires a careful analysis and
balancing of tendencies and forces. We recognize at once an immense
divergence from our inherited forms of religious faith. New Thought is
an interweaving of such psychological tendencies as we have already
traced with the implications and analogies of modern science. The God of
New Thought is an immanent God, never clearly defined; indeed it is
possible to argue from many representative utterances that the God of
New Thought is not personal at all but rather an all-pervading force, a
driving energy which we may discover both in ourselves and in the world
about us and to which conforming we are, with little effort on our own
part, carried as upon some strong, compelling tide.
The main business of life, therefore, is to discover the direction of
these forces and the laws of their operation, and as far as possible to
conform both character and conduct, through obedience to such laws, into
a triumphant partnership with such a master force--a kind of conquering
self-surrender to a power not ourselves and yet which we may not know
apart from ourselves, which makes not supremely for righteousness
(righteousness is a word not often discovered in New Thought literature)
but for harmony, happiness and success.
_It Greatly Modifies Orthodox Theology_
Such a general statement as this must, of course, be qualified. Even the
most devout whose faith and character have alike been fashioned by an
inherited religion in which the personality of God is centrally
affirmed, find their own thought about God fluctuating. So great a thing
as faith in God must always have its lights and shadows and its changing
moods. In our moments of deeper devotion and surer insight the sense of
a supreme personal reality and a vital communion therewith is most clear
and strong; then there is some ebbing of our own powers of apprehension
and we seem to be in the grip of impersonal law and at the mercy of
forces which have no concern for our own personal values. New Thought
naturally reflects all this and adds thereto uncertainties of its own.
There are passages enough in New Thought literature which recognize the
personality of God just as there are passages enough which seem to
reduce Him to power and principle and the secret of such discrepancies
is not perhaps in the creeds of New Thought, but in the varying
attitudes of its priests and prophets. One may say, then, that the God
of New Thought is always immanent, always force and law and sometimes
intimate and personal. However this force may be defined, it carries
those who commit themselves to it toward definite goals of well-being.
The New Thought of to-day reflects the optimistic note of the scientific
evolution of a generation ago. It is not exactly "God's in His heaven,
all's right with the world," but it is the affirmation of streams of
tendency whose unfailing direction is toward happiness and success.
If an element of struggle be implied in the particular sort of salvation
which New Thought preaches, it is not at least clearly brought out.
There has been amongst us of late a new and a very dearly bought
recognition of the element of struggle which seems to be implicit in all
life. The optimistic evolutionary philosophy in which New Thought roots
itself is on the whole justified neither by history nor the insight of
those who have been most rich in spiritual understanding, nor, indeed,
by the outcome of that philosophy in our own time. The happy confidence
that we do not need to struggle, but rather to commit ourselves to
forces which make automatically for happiness and well-being, has only
involved us more deeply in a struggle where in some ways the smug
happiness and well-being of representative New Thought literature seem
more remote than ever.
This elimination of the element of moral struggle and the need for
deliverance which has so greatly coloured the older theologies gives a
distinct character to New Thought theology. There is no place in it for
a scheme of redemption; there is no place in it for atonement, save as
atonement may be conceived as a vicarious sharing of suffering incident
to all struggle for better things; there is no place in it for the old
anthropologies of Christian theology. It has on the whole little to say
about sin. Says Allen, in a very thoughtful short article on New Thought
in Hastings' "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics," "New Thought
excludes such doctrines as the duality of man and God, miracles in the
accepted sense, the forgiveness of sins and priestly mediation. It seeks
to interpret the world and nature as science has recorded them, but also
to convey their finer and esoteric meanings to the human understanding.
The fundamental purpose of religion and science is the same--namely, the
discovery of truth." "New Thought does not teach the moral depravity of
man. Such thoughts demoralize and weaken the individual. Miracles, in
the accepted sense, New Thought does not conceive as possible in a
universe of law. The only miracles are phenomena not understood, but
nevertheless the result of law. It applies the pragmatic test to every
religion and philosophy. Are you true? What do you give to a man to
carry to his daily task?" "New Thought recognizes no authority save the
voice of the soul speaking to each individual. Every soul can interpret
aright the oracles of truth."
_Tends to Become a Universal and Loosely-Defined Religion_
Worship becomes, therefore, contemplation rather than adoration, and a
vast deal of the liturgical material which Christianity specifically has
heretofore supplied becomes useless for this cult. Christian hymnology
would need much editing before it would serve New Thought purposes; the
whole conception of prayer would need to be altered. Naturally, then, on
its more distinctly religious side New Thought is at once fluctuating
and incomplete. It is the proclamation, to quote one of its spokesmen,
of a robust individualism and, in the individual, mind is supreme. Right
thinking is the key to right living. New Thought affirms the limitless
possibilities of the individual. Here perhaps it is more loose in its
thinking than in any other region. It makes free use of the word
"infinite" and surrounds itself with an atmosphere of boundless hope as
alluring as it is vague.
The interest of New Thought is most largely in the present tenses of
life; its future in an eternal progress which should, of course, imply
immortality. New Thought is hospitable to truth from whatever source
derived. It is particularly hospitable to the suggestions of oriental
religions and, as far as it has taken form as a distinct religious
movement, it is becoming more and more markedly a kind of syncretism, a
putting together of religious elements drawn from widely universal
sources and it patently seeks nothing less than a universal religious
fellowship in which the values of all true faith are recognized and
which is to be under the control of what science has to say about the
world without and psychology of the world within. In a sentence New
Thought is an outstanding aspect of the unconquerably religious in human
nature, seeking to subdue to its own ends and inform with its own spirit
the new material which science, psychology and comparative religion have
put at our service in the last two generations.
If New Thought diverges from the accepted Christian theology in many
ways, it runs parallel in other regions with what is enduringly true in
the Gospels, and it runs parallel also with not a little of that
endeavour after theological reconstruction which is loosely known as the
New Theology. We are generally under a compulsion to reconstruct our
creeds and adapt our religious thinking to whatever is true about us in
our understanding of our world and its history and its mechanism and the
laws of our own lives. Theology must take account of a creative
evolution and a humanity which has struggled upward from far-off
beginnings along a far-flung front and the findings of Science and the
intimations of Psychology.
It will need a deal of pioneering to find roads through these new
regions and such adventurous souls as seek new paths, with a daring
disregard for ancient landmarks and a true passion to find religious
meanings in new facts and forces, are really serving us all. There is
the danger, however, that in the very freedom of their speculation they
may be too impatient of old experiences and hallowed certainties, for
these old experiences themselves are deeply rooted and testify to
realities which we may be compelled to let in by the window, once we
have put them out at the door.