Ernest Holmes read Emerson at nineteen and said afterwards that everything he later taught was in there somewhere. He studied Christian Science, then took classes with Emma Curtis Hopkins, lectured on mental healing in Los Angeles through the 1920s to audiences that outgrew every hall he hired, and in 1926 published The Science of Mind, which is at once a philosophy, a textbook and a manual of practice.
Its centre is a technique he named spiritual mind treatment. A treatment is not a petition and is not addressed to a listening deity who may or may not consent. It is a structured affirmative statement, worked through in stages, whose purpose is to change the practitioner's own conviction about the situation, on the premise that a universal creative Mind responds impersonally and lawfully to the thought held in it. Holmes drew the metaphor from science on purpose: he wanted a method that could be stated, taught and used by anyone, and tested by whether it worked.
He was a synthesiser rather than a revelator, and said so. He drew on New Thought healing, on transcendentalism, on the idealist philosophy he had read, and on whatever contemporary psychology he found useful, and he was open about the borrowing in a way that founders often are not.