Step 1. The premise: thought is causative
New Thought begins with a clockmaker's son in Maine. Phineas Quimby, treating patients in the 1860s, concluded that much of what ailed them was belief wearing the costume of disease, and that changing the belief changed the patient. His notebooks pass through Warren Felt Evans and Emma Curtis Hopkins into a whole movement: mind is not a bystander to your life but a cause within it.
Every later author restates the premise in his own key. James Allen: a man is literally what he thinks. Ernest Holmes: thought is creative, and it creates through law rather than favour. Joseph Murphy: the subconscious accepts what the conscious mind repeats, and then works to make the world match.
Read the premise at its strongest and its weakest and you will use it well. At its strongest it says: your interpretation of events sets your response, your response sets your behaviour, and your behaviour over years sets your circumstances. At its weakest it says thinking alone rearranges matter. The first is defensible and enormously useful. The second is not, and the tradition's best teachers — Wattles insisting on acting in a 'certain way', Hill on the definite plan — never rested on it.
The claim
A single Intelligence is present in each person; sustained thought impresses itself on it and returns as health, circumstance and supply.
What the evidence says
Cognitive science supports the softer mechanism generously: appraisal shapes emotion (Beck, Ellis), expectancy produces measurable physiological change (the placebo literature), and self-efficacy predicts persistence and therefore outcome (Bandura, 1977). It does not support thought acting directly on matter or on other people, and no controlled study has shown it.
Where it goes wrong
Treating the strong claim as proven, then blaming yourself — or the sick and the poor — for insufficient positivity. The tradition's own founders were healers, not accusers.
In their own words
“Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.”
James Allen, As a Man Thinketh (1903)
“Treatment is not willing things to happen; it is knowing that they already are.”
Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind (1926)
“The starting point is the recognition of a universal creative process.”
Thomas Troward, The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science (1904)
Your drills
Daily practice: Each evening, write the one sentence you told yourself most often today. Nothing else. A week of these is your real curriculum.