New Thought in America
by M.W.
Frater Dr. Claude Brodeur IXo, SRIC
Several twentieth century movements seem
to have been influenced by Rosicrucian ideals. These movements
were largely religious in nature and offshoots of different Christian
denominations, like the New Thought Movement, the Unity Church
of Christianity, and Norman Vincent Peale's Christianity of positive
thinking.
One writer especially typifies these
early twentieth-century movements, namely Thomas Troward. He
seems to be the most systematic thinker to have described the
foundations of this New Thought movement. He expresses
himself succinctly and writes about metaphysical subjects not
in an abstract and mystical manner, but practically and grounding
his thinking in the scientific ideas of his day.
Troward's first and best known book was
a collection of talks he delivered in Scotland and England under
the title of Edinburgh Lectures On Mental Science.
I have been unable, through my researches, to establish the date
and place of his first talk. The earliest mention of his
lectures I have been so far able to find is in The
Times Index for October 27, 1916. There are
references suggesting that the talks were given much earlier
than that date.
First, allow me to establish Troward's
connection with the new religious movements of the time.
They were called New Thought. These new movements, and
Troward's connection with them, are mentioned in the Encyclopedia
Americana (Volume 20, 1984 edition), under "New
Thought." His name is mentioned among several early writers
on the subject of New Thought, the others being Ella Wheeler
Wilcox, Edwin Markham, Prentice Mulford, Ralph Waldo Trine, all
in the United States, and Thomas Troward is mentioned as a representative
of New Thought in England.
Next, I'ld like to present evidence from
Troward's writings themselves demonstrating his connection with
Rosicrucianism. In his Edinburgh Lectures On
Mental Science, Troward ends his lectures with
the following words, to quote:
The Question of the specific lines on
which the individual may be most perfectly trained into such
recognition of his true relation to the All-embracing Spirit
of Life is therefore of supreme importance, but it is also of
such magnitude that even to briefly sketch its broad outlines
would require a volume to itself, and I will therefore not attempt
to enter upon it here, my present purpose being only to offer
some hints of the principles underlying that wonderful three-fold
unity of Body, Soul, and Spirit which we all know ourselves to
be.
We are as yet only at the commencement
of the path which leads to the realization of this unity in the
full development of all its powers, but others have trodden the
way before us, from whose experiences we may learn; and not least
among these was the illustrious founder of the Most Christian
Fraternity of the Rosicrucians. This master-mind, setting
out in his youth with the intention of going to Jerusalem, changed
the order of his journey and first sojourned for three years
in the symbolical city of Damcar, in the mystical country of
Arabia, then for about a year in the mystical country of Egypt,
and then for two years in the mystical country of Fez.
Then, having during these six years learned all that was to be
acquired in those countries, he returned to his native land of
Germany, where, on the basis of the knowledge he had thus gained,
he founded the Fraternity R.C., for whose instruction he wrote
the mystical books M. and T. Then, when he realized
that his work in its present stage was accomplished, he of his
own free will laid aside the physical body, not, it is recorded,
by decay, or disease, or ordinary death, but by the express direction
of the Spirit of Life, summing up all his knowledge in the words,
"Jesus mihi omnia."
And now his followers await the coming
of "the Artist Elias," who shall bring the Magnum Opus
to its completion. "Let him that readeth understand."
This quote would seem to indicate quite
openly that Troward considered his thinking to be a contemporary
representation of Rosicrucian philosophy.
In the 1921 Christmas Supplement to The
Bookman (Volume 61-62, containing the issues of
The Bookman from October, 1921 to March,
1922), a photograph of Thomas Troward appears on page 121, with
the following caption: "The Late Mr. T. Troward,
a new and uniform edition of whose works in mental science Messrs. Philpot
Ltd. are publishing." It is from that edition
that I have quoted Troward's reference to Rosicrucianism.
My own copy of the Edinburgh
Lectures On Mental Science gives no date of publication.
The only reviews of the book I could find were published in 1915,
one on the 3rd of March in The Outlook,
and the other on the 3rd of June in the Boston Transcript.
The forward in my copy of the book, by Troward himself,
is dated March, 1904. Presumably, the lectures were delivered
before 1904 and published in a first printing much before the
1915 review in the The Outlook and
the Boston Transcript. Originally
the lectures were delivered in Edinburgh, and apparently these
lectures became the first in a series of lectures on philosophy,
psychology and religion. The title of the book mentioned
in the Boston Transcript review
is in fact the Edinburgh Lectures On Mental
Science (Edinburgh Lecture Series). But,
remember, the reviews mention that the publishers were providing
later editions of his works, were revised and enlarged
editions. I do not know how much they were revised and
enlarged, for I have been unable to find copies of the originals.
The Edinburgh Lectures are described in the Boston Transcript
as a course of lectures given by the author in Edinburgh.
The review is a short synopsis of what's in the book. It's
about the relation between personal and universal mind, the connection
being demonstrated, according to the review, with great force
of logic, arguing that subjective mind is universal. Moreover,
Troward is said to argue that this subjective mind is the same
one at work throughout the universe. This, indeed, does
seem to be an important metaphysical principle for Troward, and
it also happens to be a principal tenet of Rosicrucianism.
This review further continues to elaborate
the main points of Troward's Edinburgh Lectures,
that, in a manner of speaking, our individual subjective mind,
if technically speaking we can call it our mind,
is more strictly speaking our share in the universal mind; that
this subjective mind may be imagined as a fountain of perpetual
life which is continually renovating the body by building in
strong and healthy material; and that this subjective mind acts
only under suggestions coming from the objective mind.
Moreover, the kind of suggestion impressed upon it is amenable
to control by the will.
The review published in The
Outlook, in that same year, 1915 (three months
before the Boston Transcript review)
described Troward's lectures as likely to appeal to anyone "trying
to cross the great divide between the medieval and the modern
conception of God."
About Troward himself I have been able
to learn very little. I have found two references to his
death and two references connecting him with the New Thought
movement. In a review of his book The Law and
the Word, which appeared in the Book
Review Digest in 1917 (page 565), the reviewer
wrote: "the author, who died in 1916, was one of the
leading exponents of New Thought."
The other reference about Troward's place
in the New Thought movement appeared in a review of same book,
The Law and the Word, appearing in
The Times Literary Supplement of London
on September 16, 1917. Here he is identified as the late
Mr. Troward, a Divisional Judge in the Punjab. The
reviewer adds that Troward's approach to Christianity is from
"a fresh avenue" and that his book "may help those
whose religious attitude is represented by such a body as the
International New Thought Alliance, of which Mr. Troward
was the first vice-president." This clearly
connects Troward with the New Thought movement in North America.
Troward must have had a wide audience in North America, because
his books were reviewed in many American literary magazines of
the day.
Troward's book, The Law and
the Word, is a collection of his essays.
Paul Derrick, who appears to have been a close friend, wrote
an appreciative forward. My copy has a copyright date of
1917 and signed as the twenty-fourth printing of the lectures.
The original publication must have been long before 1917 and
somewhat after the Edinburgh lectures, which would suggest these
particular lectures were first published sometime after 1904
and before 1917.
The review of The Law and
the Word, published in 1917 in The
Times Literary Supplement of London, gives the
clearest and most comprehensive description of Troward's philosophy.
This particular review, more than any other, seems to reveal
the Rosicrucian character of Troward's philosophy. The
review acknowledges that Troward has based his philosophy on
the principle of a "Universal Subconscious mind," and
that man's subconsciousness is no more nor less than universal
and infinite God-consciousness, "from which man was created
and is maintained, and of which all physical, mental, and spiritual
manifestation is a form of expression."
The reviewer then mentions an important
idea occurring in The Law and the Word,
in the chapter on psychic experience, namely the idea of an ether
pervading all space and all substance, which idea should help
us to see that many things popularly called supernatural are
to be attributed to the action of known laws working under unknown
conditions. This kind of thinking puts a Rosicrucian stamp
on the new religious thinking called New Thought. This
makes New Thought more metaphysical and mystical in nature than
it is Christian and religious. Furthermore, this kind of
thinking was not restricted to just a handful of people. Apparently
Troward had a rather wide following at the time.
Interestingly, in this same issue of
The Times Literary Supplement,
there is a review of a book entitled Christian Science
and the Ordinary Man by Walter S. Harris.
The book is described as a discussion of some of the teachings
of Mary Baker Eddy, discoverer and founder of Christian Science.
Of course, we now know that Mary Baker Eddy's claim to be the
founder of Christian Science is unquestionable. But it
is indeed certain that she was not the discoverer of the idea
of Christian Science, nor were she and her disciples the only
ones teaching the ideas embodied in Christian Science doctrine.
The distinction of discoverer of those ideas seems to belong
to Quimby, ideas subsequently parallel with the growth of the
Christian Science Church and enshrined in the New Thought movement.
Among the discoverers was Thomas Troward.
In that same issue of The
London Times Literary Supplement is another review,
one announcing the publication of a book by Horatio W. Dresser,
called a Handbook of the New Thought.
Dresser is the one who edited and published Quimby's papers,
arguing that Quimby, not Mary Baker Eddy, first discovered and
taught the ideas germane to Christian Science. This handbook
was written apparently as a manual for those who wish to know
the origin, history, purpose and method of the so-called New
Thought movement. To quote:
The 'old' thought against which the 'new'
reacts is any form of authority, whether medical or ecclesiastical,
in so far as physicians and churches keep people in subjection
to creeds. It is in particular a protest against materialism
in all its forms.
The editions of Troward's books which
were reviewed in the English and American literary magazines
and newspapers of the early twentieth century were always advertised
as revised and enlarged editions. These revised and enlarged
editions seem to have enjoyed a popularity just around the time
World War I ended, a time unlike any other in Europe, a time
which seemed to have tried the religious faith of many people,
people who perhaps wondered how a God could have allowed such
widespread inhumanity among mankind. It was also described
as a time of reconstruction.
There appears to have been a resurgence
of interest in the humanistic study of ancient Greece.
Much was being written about the newest advances in medicine,
especially around the idea of "psycho-neurosis," ideas
which owed much to knowledge gained from treating soldiers who
had survived the dreadful experiences of man's brutality to his
fellow man in battle. Metaphysically, it would seem to
be accurate to say that there was a general upset in mankind's
conception of reality. Was a unified conception of reality
the correct one, or was the correct conception a pluralistic
one? These were the issues being discussed in 1917 in The
Times Literary Supplement of London.
May Sinclair, in her book The
Quest of Reality, reviewed in the September 16,
1917 issue of The Times Literary Supplement of London,
made this observation:
The doctrine of the One has been worked
so hard and so incessantly, and with such passionate variance
among its adherents as to the nature of their `One,' that the
reaction against it was bound to set in, and the tendency of
modern metaphysical thought is in favour of the Two or the Many.
The question of Idealistic Monism versus
Idealistic Pluralism seems to have divided the early Greek philosophers
into two camps. It is problem central to Eastern philosophy.
How are we to test the question? Are we to test it a priori,
or from our experience, a posteriori? Sinclair continues
her analysis of the dilemma by hoping that no reasonable person
would demand certainty at this point in the evolution of human
thought, and by hoping that all men could accept the fact that
the utmost we are entitled to demand is a certain balance of
probabilities.
The review continues to remind us that
the quest for an Ultimate Reality is as much a necessity of thought
for the Monist as it is a passion of the soul for the Mystic.
In the words of the reviewer, "the saints of Mysticism are
poets, and its counterpart in Philosophy is Spiritual Monism."
In the words of Mary Sinclair, the author of The
Quest of Reality:
Religion that begins in the fear of the
supernatural and ends in the consuming love of it is the historic
witness to the passion for unity common to the Monists and the
Mystics.
The New Mysticism, like the New Thought,
is alien to forms of Mysticism and religious worship that are
ascetic at one extreme and sensuous and erotic at the other.
We are advised to get rid of all magical thinking that gives
rise to Mystery. Yet, at the same time we are urged to
keep a mind open to the possibility of "occult powers of
the human individual" with their disputable results.
Too much that is called mysticism is simply a pathological form
of "dissociation", and the mention of the "unconscious"
and the "subconscious" is a lapse into the primitive
and the savage, according to Sinclair.
The new mysticism is to be robust and
joyous, and reconciled to the world, like Rabindranath Tagore
in his Gitanjali. Sinclair agrees
with Tagore that the destiny of the East is to "spiritualize
the West." Eastern mysticism is to preferred to Western
Mysticism, and especially Christian Mysticism which seems pledged
to Dualism. Perhaps, the meeting of East and West is to
be found in the Christian Humanism following upon the heels of
World War I, a humanism which some Popes denounced. More
likely, what some people were yearning for at that time is being
expressed presently in the Christian movement of Creation Theology,
being promulgated by the American Dominican priest Matthew Fox
and the Applewood Centre in Toronto, Canada.
In 1910, Troward delivered a series of
twelve lectures in London, subsequently published in a small
volume as The Dore Lectures on Mental Science.
Again, this information comes from a review which appeared in
the Boston Transcript on page 22 of
the June 30th, 1915 issue. The Dore lectures were considered
part of the Edinburgh lecture series, but not identical to the
lectures on mental science given in Edinburgh. The reviewer
notes that the lectures seem to have a certain progressive development
of thought. In spite of any differences between the Edinburgh
and the Dore lectures, one theme seems to run throughout, to
quote:
though the laws of the universe can never
be broken, they can be made to work under special conditions
which will produce results that could not be produced under the
conditions spontaneously provided by nature.
Again, my edition of the Dore
Lectures claims to be the twenty-fifth printing
and carries a copyright and publication date of September 1909.
It's most unlikely that the lectures were published before they
were delivered, so they must have been delivered after 1904 and
before 1909.
What is this New Thought movement with
which Troward was associated? According to The
New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Volume 13, 1984,
pp 14-16), the New Thought movement is "a mind healing movement
based on religious and metaphysical presuppositions concerning
the nature of reality," originating in the United States
in the nineteenth century and branching out into a great variety
of New Thought groups. The Encyclopedia Americana
describes it as "a philosophical and mental therapeutics"
movement begun in the mid-nineteenth century. It became
a popular religious movement with an extensive literature and
with churches and centres throughout the world.
The New Thought movement has been described
as "the religion of healthy-mindedness" or "the
mind-cure movement." Many New Thought advocates considered
themselves to be Christians, but this reference became more ambiguous
in the mid-twentieth century. It has been described as
an individualistic, nonliturgical religion with emphasis on the
power of constructive thinking. An example fitting this
description would be the Unity Church of Christianity.
The earliest advocate of New Thought
in North America is said to be Phineas Parkhurst Quimby of Belfast
and Portland, Maine, whose life spanned 62 years from 1802 to
1866. This raises the question for me whether New Thought had
its origin in England or in North America. At least, we
can assuredly claim that it first became institutionalized as
a movement in North America.
Quimby was considered one of the most
famous hypnotists of his day, believing and teaching the idea
that illness is a matter of the mind. Accordingly, then,
healing must make use of mental and spiritual methods.
One of Quimby's most famous patients, by the way, was Mary Baker
Eddy, who, as we have already noted, was the founder of the Christian
Science Church.
In 1904, thirty-eight years after the
death of Quimby, the first New Thought Congress was convened,
followed by the New Thought Alliance in 1908, then the International
New Thought Alliance in 1914. In the United States there
were many who joined the Alliance, like the Unity School of Christianity
founded by the Fillmore's and the Church of Religious Science
founded by Ernest Holmes.
These events were happening in North
America at a time when, judging from his publications, Troward
was evidently advancing his own ideas similar to American New
Thought teachings, ideas about the relationship of body and mind
to spirit. I have found no evidence that Troward knew about
the work of Quimby, or for that matter, that he knew of the existence
of any other American New Thought writer at the time that he
started lecturing.
Allow me to list for you a variety of
ideas that seem to have been officially publicized as characteristic
of the New Thought Alliance. The New Thought principles
mentioned in The New Encyclopedia Britannica
are:
(1) ideas are more real than matter,
suggesting that the New Thought Movement may be a kind of neo-Platonism;
(2) the material realm is one of effects
whose causes are spiritual and whose purpose is divine, which
suggests a Swedenborgian influence;
(3) truth is a matter of continuing revelation;
there is no final truth and no one person or group has the final
answers;
(4) another position put forward by the
Alliance, is not to place the movement in opposition to medical
science, as Christian Science does, but to encourage its members
to be positive and optimistic about life and its outcome.
In 1916, the following statement was
published regarding the purpose and principles of the New Thought
Alliance, namely, to teach the Infinitude of the Supreme One;
the 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. A revision of the purpose and principles
of the New Thought Alliance was published in the 1950's with
special emphasis on the immanence of God, the divine nature of
man, the immediate availability of God's power to man, the spiritual
character of the Universe, the idea that sin, human disorder,
and human disease are basically matters of incorrect thinking,
and that Jesus is to be characterized as a teacher and healer
whose kingdom is to be seen as being within a person, and finally
a growing tendency to think of material prosperity as the result
of adopting and applying New Thought principles in one's thinking
and actions. Interestingly, reference to Jesus was later
omitted from the 1954 statement of purposes and principles.
Two other features of the New Thought
movement seem worth mentioning. The New Thought seems to
be a kind of monism, encouraging its members to see in all things
the Oneness of this world. Their basic principles are strongly
gnostic, namely a rejection of a philosophy of dualism for a
philosophy which gives primacy to spirit rather than to matter,
and which sees dualism as opposed to the idea of spirit.
Books and magazines began to be published
to spread the New Thought philosophy, magazines like
New Thought, Unity, Daily Word, Divine Science Monthly, Science
of Mind, Religious Science, Crusader, and books
written by Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite
(1897), Orison Swett Marden's Pushing
to the Front (1894), Robert Collier's The
Secret of the Ages (1926), Emmet Fox,'s Power
Through Constructive Thinking (1940) and Sermon
on the Mount (1934), Glen Clark's How
to Find Health Through Prayer (1940), Norman Vincent
Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking
(1952), and Thurman Fleet's Concept-Therapy
and Rays of the Dawn (1948).
Several groups eventually splintered
from the original Unity School of Christianity. Fillmore,
who was a Methodist, founded the Unity Church of Christianity,
with headquarters in Unity Village, Missouri. Frank Rolinson,
a Baptist, founded Psychiana. And the Ballards, Mr. Ballard
being a mining engineer, founded the I AM Movement, with headquarters
in Chicago, Illinois.
I have shown that there is much in the
thinking of Troward and in other writers who identified themselves
with the broad terms of the New Thought movement that is consistent
with what we know today about the Rosicrucian metaphysics.
One reviewer of the Endinburgh Lectures on Mental
Science, ably summed up that philosophy in his
review in the March 3, 1915 issue of The Outlook.
He thought the book to be valuable, although he criticized Troward
for not being strictly precise in his terms.
Troward substitutes words like "Spirit"
and "Life" for the term "God." This
could be said to be what Jesus thought, when he is quoted to
have said "God is Spirit..." Troward's ideas
also seemed to correspond philosophically with the ideas of evolution,
namely, "one life in all lives." And that one
life is intelligently building all living bodies, actively carrying
on all our subconscious processes of nutrition, growth, repair,
and welling up into conscious activities controlled by our will.
The review goes on eloquently to state that in this universal
Life or Spirit we each dwell island-like in an ocean, we in God
and God in us. Our challenge is to identify our individual
selves in conscious thought, desire and purpose with the Universal
Life in the subconscious deepths of our being, trying to think
the thought and do the will of the indwelling One so as to realize
our Unity with Him and all the good conditioned thereon.
The present trend, notes the reviewer, is to reduce theology
to biology, and Troward's Mental Science seems to take this line
throughout.
It would seem that Troward's thinking
and the Rosicrucian philosophy that it represents continues to
find expression today in the continued existence of the New Thought
Alliance and its related organizations, chief among them being
the Unity Church of Christianity, the Concept-Therapy movement,
the Silva Mind Control movement and the Creation Theology movement
within the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. And as Eastern
philosophy and psychology gains greater acceptance in the West,
the philosophy and metaphysics of Rosicrucianism will perhaps
find greater appeal among students looking for a religion and
mysticism that harmonizes with the truths and facts of science,
for as Teilhard de Chardin demonstrated, in true Rosicrucian
fashion, the boundaries between science and religion are fine
indeed, if indeed in the final analysis nonexistent.