James Allen's As a Man Thinketh: A Shilling Pamphlet From Proverbs

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1903 James Allen published As a Man Thinketh, a small book sold for one shilling and marketed as a pocket companion for thoughtful people. It was announced in July 1903 in a publication called The Light of Reason. Allen wrote in plain, direct language for ordinary readers in an industrial age, arguing that each person holds the master key to every condition in their life inside their own thought world, and that patient, intelligent work on one's thoughts can remake a life and transform circumstances.

The title comes from the Book of Proverbs, but the original verse is a warning about eating at the table of a deceitful host with an evil eye, whose words do not match his heart. Allen turned that warning about other people's motives into a doctrine of self-examination. The book is now counted as foundational New Thought literature, part of a movement that promoted the law of attraction, positive mental attitude, affirmative prayer and creative visualization, and that treated thoughts as forces in an age newly fascinated with electricity and radio waves. The episode traces that line to Wallace Wattles, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, and to critiques that the idea borders on blaming people for misfortune.

• Allen deliberately kept the language simple so that anyone, regardless of education, could put the methods into daily practice.
• The original proverb warns that the reader will vomit up the host's delicacies and regret the kind words spoken.
• Many New Thought believers held that the mind was connected to a universal divine intelligence.
• The hosts contrast Allen's focus on character and inner peace with the later turn toward manifesting wealth.
• The text is in the public domain, and Project Gutenberg released it as an e-text in October 2003, a century after publication.