Where the Law of Attraction Actually Came From

Portland, Maine, 1859: a clockmaker who healed with conversation

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby made clocks, had almost no schooling, and believed he was dying of consumption. What changed his mind was a carriage ride: hard driving in the open air left him feeling better, and he concluded that it was not the ride but what he expected from the ride that had done it.

In the 1830s he took up mesmerism — the traveling stage hypnotism of the day — and worked with a young clairvoyant who would go into trance, "see" a patient's disease and prescribe a cure. The cures worked. They also worked when the boy prescribed nonsense. Quimby drew the obvious conclusion and fired the boy.

From 1859 he saw patients in an office in Portland, thousands of them over the next seven years, and treated them by talking. His argument, written out in manuscripts that were not published in full until 1921, was that disease is an error of mind — a false belief held in place by a doctor's diagnosis and the patient's fear — and that explanation can dissolve it.

Two of those patients matter for everything that follows. In 1862 a chronically ill widow from New Hampshire came to him and got better: Mary Baker Eddy, who would go on to found Christian Science and to insist for the rest of her life that she owed Quimby nothing. And a Swedenborgian minister, Warren Felt Evans, published The Mental Cure in 1869 — the movement's first book, written while the movement still had no name.

Emma Curtis Hopkins and the women who built the movement

The name and the institutions came from a woman most Americans have never heard of. Emma Curtis Hopkins edited Eddy's journal, left in a dispute in 1885, and opened a seminary in Chicago that ordained several hundred ministers within a few years — most of them women, at a time when essentially no American denomination ordained women at all.

Her students built what still exists. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded Unity in 1889; Unity Village outside Kansas City is still there, still printing Daily Word, still running a prayer line. Malinda Cramer founded Divine Science. Ernest Holmes, from her last generation of students, founded Religious Science in 1927, whose congregations today call themselves Centers for Spiritual Living and whose magazine, Science of Mind, has been publishing since 1927. Hopkins was known in the movement as the teacher of teachers.

By the 1890s the whole thing had a name: New Thought. Its doctrine fits in three sentences, and every bestseller since has only decorated them. God — or Spirit, Mind, the Universe, Infinite Intelligence — is a power that pervades everything. The human mind is part of that power. Therefore what the mind believes shapes reality: health first, then wealth, then everything else.

The chain: who learned from whom

Year	What happened
1859	Quimby opens his Portland office and treats by conversation; Mary Baker Eddy becomes a patient in 1862
1869	Warren Felt Evans, The Mental Cure — the first book of the movement
1886	Emma Curtis Hopkins opens her Chicago seminary; her students found Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science
1889	Prentice Mulford writes that thoughts are things
1897	Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite — over two million copies
1906	William Walker Atkinson, Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World — the phrase reaches a book cover
1910	Wallace Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich
1923	Émile Coué tours the United States to overflow audiences, teaching autosuggestion
1937	Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
1952	Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking
1963	Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
2006	Rhonda Byrne, The Secret — Wattles, filmed; two Oprah episodes in 2007 turn it into a household phrase

"Thoughts are things": how healing became wealth

Quimby was treating sick people. After about 1890 the subject changed to money.

Prentice Mulford, a former California gold miner turned journalist, wrote pamphlets he distributed himself, and gave the movement its most portable sentence: thoughts are things — they have substance, and they draw like to like. Ralph Waldo Trine sold over two million copies of In Tune with the Infinite in 1897; Henry Ford is widely said to have credited it for his success, a story repeated so often that it now travels without a source.

The phrase was coined in Chicago in 1906

The wording you know came from a Chicago lawyer and publisher. William Walker Atkinson published Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World in 1906. He did not invent the idea, but he gave it the physics costume it has worn ever since: thoughts vibrate, and vibrations attract like vibrations — an analogy drawn from the telegraph and the brand-new science of radio waves.

The same Atkinson is the best candidate for authorship of The Kybalion (1908), published under the pseudonym "Three Initiates" and presented as ancient Hermetic wisdom from Egypt. It is a New Thought book with Egyptian trim. So when someone tells you the law of attraction is ancient Hermetic knowledge, the honest answer is that both texts appear to come from the same pen, in the same decade, in the same city. Our separate piece on what the Kybalion actually says goes through that attribution in detail.

Wallace Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, a thin book built on the claim that there is a thinking substance from which all things are made, and that it takes the form your thought impresses on it. Rhonda Byrne has said she found that book in 2004; two years later it became The Secret. In between stand Napoleon Hill, who turned the doctrine into a success program for businessmen in 1937 — and whose famous account of being commissioned by Andrew Carnegie has never been documented — Norman Vincent Peale, who carried it back into the Protestant pulpit from Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan in 1952, and Joseph Murphy, whose Power of Your Subconscious Mind has not been out of print since 1963. Neville Goddard, the most elegant writer in the line, belongs to the same generation; his version is covered separately in the law of assumption.

The movement also has a Christian descendant that rarely gets named in the same breath: the prosperity gospel preached in large American churches, which shares the premise that faith rightly applied produces material return. Different vocabulary, same engine.

What holds up — and where the research stops

This is not written to mock New Thought. Part of what Quimby noticed was real, and psychology later confirmed it under other names.

The placebo effect is Quimby's discovery in modern vocabulary: expectation measurably changes perception, pain and nausea, and within limits some bodily processes. The self-fulfilling prophecy, named as a sociological term in 1948, describes how an expectation changes behavior in the direction that confirms it. And attention research has shown for decades that we notice what we are set to notice — someone with a clear goal spots openings they walked past last week.

Then comes the point where the teaching leaves the evidence behind. Gabriele Oettingen, a psychologist at New York University, has spent more than twenty years studying what positive fantasies actually do, and the finding is uncomfortable for every vision board ever made: people who vividly and pleasurably imagine the goal as already achieved reach it less often on average. Students who dreamed of the grade studied less. Dieters who pictured themselves slim lost less weight. Graduates with the rosiest images took longer to find work and were paid less when they did. The fantasy delivers the reward in advance, and the body relaxes as though the thing were done.

What does work is a small change: picture the outcome, then picture the obstacle honestly, then make one plan for the obstacle. Oettingen calls it mental contrasting, and it is — if you like — positive thinking with a shadow side.

Doctrine and evidence, side by side

The teaching	What is established	What is not
Belief heals (Quimby)	Placebo and expectancy effects on pain, nausea and well-being	Healing of organic disease by thought
Thoughts attract like (Atkinson)	Selective attention; self-fulfilling prophecy through behavior	A physical vibration that draws events toward you
Visualize the goal as achieved	A short-term lift in mood	Higher goal attainment — Oettingen's data show the opposite
Affirmations reprogram you	Small effects for people who already have stable self-regard	Benefit for people with low self-esteem; there the mood gets worse (Wood et al., 2009)
You are responsible for everything that happens to you	A sense of agency supports action	Illness, poverty and loss as wrongly-thought — the most damaging sentence in the whole tradition

The shadow: when gratitude turns into blame

Here is the part this magazine is obliged to say out loud. New Thought has a reverse side, and it is in every one of its books, usually in a subordinate clause: if your thinking shapes your life, then you also thought the bad part. The sick woman attracted her illness. The poor man attracted his poverty. The one who was left attracted the leaving.

Barbara Ehrenreich, writing after her own breast cancer diagnosis, described in 2009 how that logic operates in American cancer support culture, where failing to stay positive becomes a personal fault and, by implication, a cause of relapse. William James, who described the movement with real respect in his 1902 Gifford Lectures, called it the religion of healthy-mindedness — and set against it the "sick souls," those who cannot think suffering away, whom he considered the deeper of the two.

Anyone who manifests should know this shadow. Not in order to stop, but in order to leave the teaching at the point where it leaves you: where it says there is no chance, no structure, no accident and no illness that you did not think into being. That is not empowerment. It is blame with a smile on it. If the whole vocabulary starts doing that work for you, the piece on spiritual bypassing is the more useful read.

What we don't promise

We do not claim that thoughts emit a vibration that attracts events, money or people; there is no physical mechanism for it and no evidence of it. We do not claim that positive thinking heals or prevents disease — Quimby's patients did not recover because of thought, and anyone who believes that today is taking a real risk with their health. We do not claim that visualizing brings you closer to a goal; the research says that on its own it does the opposite. What we do say: expectation changes perception, clarity changes action, and a ritual can concentrate both. That is less than the movement promised. It is what is left when you are honest, and it is enough to change how a year goes.

Practical: how to use this

• Know where it came from. Anyone selling you the law of attraction as quantum physics, ancient Hermetic wisdom or Eastern teaching either does not know the history or is counting on you not knowing it. It is nineteenth-century American religious history, and there is no shame in that.
• Swap "attract" for "align." One word changes the posture: it moves you from recipient to actor. Nothing arrives in the mail.
• Contrast. Wish, then the honest obstacle, then one plan for the obstacle. Three lines. This is the single most useful sentence in this article, and it is Oettingen's finding, not ours. If you like doing it on paper, scripting is the same mechanism in a longer form.
• Go carefully with affirmations if your self-regard is low. "I am lovable" measurably worsens mood in people who do not believe it. Say something smaller and true instead: "I am learning to like myself."
• Hand the blame back. If anyone tells you that you attracted your illness, your divorce or your bad year, leave the room. That is the part of the teaching that its own most sympathetic observer found intolerable in 1902.

Frequently asked questions

Where did the law of attraction come from?
From New Thought, an American movement that grew out of the healing practice of Phineas Quimby, a clockmaker in Portland, Maine, in the 1860s. The phrase itself first appeared on a book cover in 1906, in William Walker Atkinson's Thought Vibration. Its modern popularity comes from Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006), which is based on Wallace Wattles' 1910 book.

Is the law of attraction scientifically proven?
No. What is established is expectancy and placebo effects, selective attention, and self-fulfilling prophecies that work through behavior. What is not established is any physical attraction produced by thought — and studies of positive fantasizing suggest that visualizing alone lowers the odds of reaching a goal.

What is New Thought?
A religious-philosophical movement, organized in the United States from the 1880s onward, holding that mind is part of a divine power and that belief shapes health, prosperity and circumstance. Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science (Centers for Spiritual Living) are its surviving denominations.

How is Christian Science related?
Mary Baker Eddy was Quimby's patient and student in 1862 and later founded Christian Science. The two share a root but separated early: Christian Science is a church with fixed doctrine that rejects medical treatment, while New Thought is an open movement with no such rule.

Is positive thinking harmful?
Not in itself. It becomes harmful when it explains suffering as self-inflicted, when it replaces medical care, or when visualizing substitutes for doing the thing. As an orientation that looks honestly at obstacles, it is useful.

Did the idea really come from a clockmaker?
Yes. Quimby had almost no formal schooling and made clocks and daguerreotypes before he began treating patients. His manuscripts were not published in full until 1921, more than fifty years after his death, which is one reason his students got the credit.

Sources and further reading

• Mitch Horowitz, One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (2014) — the fullest single history.
• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lectures IV–V on the religion of healthy-mindedness.
• Gabriele Oettingen, Rethinking Positive Thinking (2014) — mental contrasting and the fantasy problem.
• Joanne V. Wood, W. Q. Elaine Perunovic and John W. Lee, "Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others," Psychological Science 20 (2009).
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided (2009) — on positive thinking in American illness culture.
• William Walker Atkinson, Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906); Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich (1910).
• In the magazine: the law of assumption · the Kybalion · scripting · spiritual bypassing