New Thought Movement · 1880 to Present · Dominant Mental States Attract Corresponding Circumstances
As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.Proverbs 23:7 — The Bible, KJV
The Law of Attraction — the principle that one's dominant mental states tend to attract corresponding circumstances, people, and opportunities — is the central philosophical claim of the New Thought movement that produced Napoleon Hill, James Allen, Wallace Wattles, and Charles Haanel. In its most literal form, the law is not empirically well-supported; the universe does not sort cosmic particles according to human desires. But in the form that its most serious proponents actually advocated, it contains a genuine and practically important insight: what one habitually thinks about shapes what one perceives, how one behaves, what opportunities one recognizes, and what relationships one attracts — and these effects, compounded over time, produce outcomes that can appear almost magical to those who don't observe the mechanism.
The mechanism is not mystical. The person who habitually thinks about possibilities tends to notice them; the person who habitually thinks about obstacles tends to notice those. Confirmation bias is real, and the content of one's dominant thoughts shapes the filter through which reality is perceived. The person who acts with confidence tends to attract the cooperation of others who respond to confidence; the person who approaches interactions with expectation of failure tends to produce interactions that confirm it. These are not laws of cosmic sympathy but laws of perception, behavior, and human response — and they are genuine.
Napoleon Hill was careful, in Think and Grow Rich, to ground the Law of Attraction in these practical mechanisms: the subconscious mind, operating on its stored impressions, creates behavior patterns that attract corresponding results; the person with a definite major purpose, held with genuine emotion, acts differently than the person without one, and is therefore treated differently by the world. The law works through people and circumstances, not through magic — but it works.
The New Thought movement emerged in the late nineteenth century from the confluence of American Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau), the mental healing movement (Phineas Quimby), and popular Protestant theology. Its central claim was that mind precedes matter — that the quality of one's mental life is the primary determinant of one's material circumstances. This claim was made in varying degrees of literalness and metaphysical elaboration by different writers, ranging from the carefully nuanced (James Allen) to the enthusiastically literal (various contemporary Law of Attraction advocates).
James Allen's As a Man Thinketh, published in 1903, is the most careful and enduring statement of the core insight. Allen does not claim that wishing produces outcomes; he claims that character — the accumulated product of habitual thought — produces action, and action produces circumstances. The law is not about attraction in the cosmic sense but about the natural consequences of the mental and behavioral patterns one builds through habitual thought. This is a defensible and important claim, quite different from the more magical accounts that followed.
The scientific literature on what researchers call "self-fulfilling prophecies" provides empirical support for the mechanism behind the Law of Attraction. Robert Merton's original account showed that beliefs about social reality tend to produce behaviors that make those beliefs true. Teachers who believe certain students are capable tend to interact with them in ways that develop their capabilities; students who believe they can succeed tend to put in the effort that makes success more likely. The expectations we hold about ourselves and others are not merely predictions; they are interventions.
You become what you think about most of the time.Earl Nightingale — The Strangest Secret, 1956