New Thought Movement · 1937 to Present · Napoleon Hill on the Storehouse of Character
The subconscious mind will not remain idle. If you fail to plant desires in your subconscious mind, it will feed on the thoughts which reach it as the result of your neglect.Napoleon Hill — Think and Grow Rich, 1937
The subconscious mind, as Napoleon Hill described it, is the intermediary between conscious thought and the vast domain of habit, character, and physiological response that operates below the threshold of deliberate awareness. It receives impressions from both the external senses and the internal emotional life, stores them, and acts on them in ways that powerfully shape behavior without requiring — or permitting — conscious review. Hill's account anticipates the modern understanding of implicit memory and automatic processing by several decades.
The practical importance of this concept lies in what it implies about the formation of character. If the subconscious mind acts on its stored impressions without conscious oversight, then the most important question is: what is being stored? The person who allows their mental environment to be shaped by habitual anxiety, resentment, or defeat is programming their own subconscious toward those states. The person who deliberately seeds their subconscious with specific desires, vivid expectations, and emotional certainty is doing the same thing with opposite results.
This is why Hill's entire system of achievement — from definiteness of purpose to autosuggestion to the mastermind alliance — is ultimately about managing the inputs to the subconscious mind. The subconscious cannot be directly commanded. It can only be influenced through repetition, emotion, and the quality of mental imagery offered to it. The person who understands this is in a fundamentally different relationship with their own mind than the person who does not.
The concept of an unconscious dimension of mental life predates Freud by centuries — philosophers from Leibniz to Schopenhauer wrote about mental processes that operate below awareness. But it was the late nineteenth century that produced the first systematic investigations: Pierre Janet's studies of automatic behavior, William James's work on habit as "the enormous flywheel of society," and Freud's development of psychoanalysis. Hill drew on a different strand of this tradition — the New Thought movement's essentially optimistic account of the subconscious as a reservoir of creative power rather than a repository of repressed conflict.
The New Thought writers — Prentice Mulford, Ralph Waldo Trine, Thomas Troward — developed the idea that the subconscious mind was the interface between individual consciousness and a larger universal intelligence. Whether or not one accepts this metaphysical framework, the practical observation beneath it is sound: the beliefs and images stored at the level of habit and automatic response shape behavior more powerfully than conscious intention alone.
Contemporary cognitive science distinguishes between System 1 and System 2 thinking — automatic, intuitive processing versus deliberate, effortful reasoning. System 1 is faster, operates constantly, and shapes far more of behavior than most people realize. Hill's "subconscious mind" maps closely onto System 1: the domain of ingrained habit, emotional association, and automatic response that sets the context within which conscious deliberation occurs.
The mind is everything. What you think you become.Attributed to the Buddha — Dhammapada, c. 500 BC