Sacred Texts: New Thought

Creative Mind and Success: Part I: Causes and Conditions

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is an excerpt from a 1919 New Thought self-help work by Ernest Shurtleff Holmes, founder of Religious Science, squarely within the early 20th-century metaphysical tradition that includes figures like Ralph Waldo Trine and Wallace Wattles. The central argument is that physical reality is an *effect* of mental and spiritual causes: thought acts upon an infinite, undifferentiated Substance (equated with God or Spirit) to produce material conditions, much as Edison harnesses electricity. Human limitation, Holmes contends, is not a feature of the universe but a product of false belief — the infinite Substance is never scarce, but people draw from it only as much as they genuinely believe they can receive. The text draws on the Bhagavad Gita to support its claim that there is one underlying reality which manifests differently according to individual consciousness. Practically, Holmes prescribes disciplined replacement of negative thoughts with "positive, constructive" ones, framing this as a gradual, cumulative practice requiring self-compassion but ultimately leading to mastery. Readers drawn to the history of New Thought, prosperity gospel antecedents, or the philosophical roots of later works like *The Secret* will find this a clear, foundational example of the genre.

Creative Mind and Success: Part I: Causes and Conditions

Related pages View as graph →