Modern manifestation did not begin on the internet. It comes from a handful of writers working between the 1890s and the 1960s, most of whom knew and borrowed from each other. These pages set out who each of them actually was, what they taught in their own words, and where to read them.
Neville Goddard (1905–1972) — Teacher of the law of assumption. Neville Goddard taught, for roughly thirty-five years, one idea in many forms: that imagination is the creative power in a human being, and that assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled is the whole technique. Almost every modern manifestation method traces back to a sentence of his.
Florence Scovel Shinn (1871–1940) — Teacher of the spoken word. Florence Scovel Shinn was an illustrator before she was a teacher, and it shows in the writing: short scenes, named clients, a decree at the end of nearly every argument. She is the origin of the spoken affirmation as it is practised today.
Thomas Troward (1847–1916) — The lineage's systematic thinker. Troward is the one member of this lineage who argues rather than instructs. He spent twenty-five years as a judge in British India, retired, and then set out to give the mental-science claims of his day something like a logical structure.
Wallace D. Wattles (1860–1911) — Teacher of the creative, not competitive, mind. Wattles wrote a short, blunt book in 1910 about prosperity and then died a year later, largely unknown. A century on it is one of the most-read New Thought texts in existence, mostly because of one distinction it makes.
James Allen (1864–1912) — Essayist of thought and character. As a Man Thinketh is about seven thousand words long and has never been out of print since 1903. Allen wrote it in a cottage in Devon, having given up a clerk's salary to write full time, and he was dead nine years later at forty-seven.
Charles F. Haanel (1866–1949) — Author of The Master Key System. Haanel was a St. Louis businessman who wrote the most systematic training course New Thought produced: twenty-four weekly parts, each with one exercise, building attention into a usable faculty. It was sold by post from 1912 and has never really gone out of circulation since.
Genevieve Behrend (1881–1960) — Troward's only personal pupil. Behrend studied personally with Thomas Troward — the only student he ever took — and then spent her life turning his dense mental science into instructions an ordinary reader could follow. Your Invisible Power, published in 1921, is the result.
Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) — Divine Science minister, writer on the subconscious mind. Joseph Murphy wrote the best-selling book this whole lineage has produced. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind appeared in 1963 and has sold in the millions since, largely because Murphy took the New Thought argument and stripped it of metaphysical vocabulary until it read like practical psychology.
Emmet Fox (1886–1951) — Divine Science minister and preacher. Emmet Fox trained as an electrical engineer and ended up preaching to audiences of several thousand in New York, first at the Hippodrome and then at Carnegie Hall. He read the Gospels as a psychological instruction manual, and that reading reached far beyond New Thought — early members of Alcoholics Anonymous were handed his books as a matter of course.