Reading the new-thought writers with William James beside you

The writers on the society's first shelf — Wallace Wattles, Florence Scovel Shinn, James Allen, Thomas Troward, Ralph Waldo Trine, Ernest Holmes, Neville Goddard — are usually grouped together as New Thought. Not all of them used the label, and they disagreed about a good deal. What they shared was a conviction that the mind is not a passive mirror of circumstance but an active cause of it.

A sympathetic sceptic

The most useful companion for reading them is William James. In the Gifford Lectures he gave in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, James gave two lectures to what he called the religion of healthy-mindedness, and in them he wrote at length about the "mind-cure" movement then spreading across America.

James did not dismiss it. He noticed that it worked for many of the people who practised it, and he was a psychologist interested in what works. But he also named its blind spot. Healthy-mindedness, he argued, keeps evil out of its field of vision, while the outlook he called the "sick soul" begins by looking straight at it.

Why that matters for a reader

Keep James's distinction in mind and the new-thought books become easier to read honestly. When Allen writes in As a Man Thinketh that a person is what they think, you can take what is true in it — that habits of attention shape a life — without accepting that every misfortune is self-made. When Neville Goddard teaches that imagination creates reality, you can practise his exercises and still ask, with James, what they are good for and for whom.

The society's own principle is that thought has to meet practice. James supplies the test he used himself: judge these ideas by their fruits, not by their roots. Some of them will feed you. Some will not survive a hard year. A good reading circle can tell the difference.

Where to start

Read Allen in an evening. Then read James's two lectures on healthy-mindedness. Bring both to a circle and argue about them. You will find that the two books read each other.