Creative Mind and Success: Part II: Enlarging Our Thought

*Creative Mind and Success* (1919) is a short motivational essay by Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science, written in the tradition of New Thought—a late 19th/early 20th-century movement holding that mind and consciousness are the primary forces shaping material reality. Holmes argues that personal and professional growth is governed by a mental law: outer circumstances expand only as far as one's inner thoughts expand, meaning stagnation is always a failure of imagination first and circumstance second. He catalogs the specific mental habits that cap people's success—fatalism ("this is as far as anyone can go"), age-based resignation, and fear of competition—framing each as a self-imposed ceiling rather than an external constraint. The essay's central prescription is a daily practice of deliberately visualizing slightly more than one currently has (fifty customers becomes sixty, sixty becomes seventy), holding that expanded vision as already accomplished, and refusing to speak or dwell on limitation. What is distinctive is Holmes's confident universalism: he insists there is literally no circumstance—age, industry, competition—that can override the law of mental expansion, because consciousness is aligned with an infinite, boundless power. The text is targeted at practical businesspeople but grounds its advice in a metaphysical claim that life *is* consciousness, making growth a cosmic rather than merely motivational imperative.

Creative Mind and Success: Part II: Enlarging Our Thought

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