Part of a Longer American Lineage

This picture of an indwelling divine mind did not originate with New Thought itself but continues a considerably longer current running through American religious history. Historians of that current trace a line running from eighteenth century Swedenborgianism, with its teaching of a correspondence between spiritual and natural worlds, through nineteenth century Mesmerism's own claims about a subtle universal force moving through all things and all people alike, and on into New Thought's teaching of mind as the active governing principle of reality itself. Read against that longer lineage, New Thought is not an isolated nineteenth century invention appearing from nowhere but the point at which several earlier strands of what scholars now call American metaphysical religion converged into one organized, self sustaining movement with its own churches, its own publishing houses and, eventually, its own separate denominations, several of which still carry recognizable versions of the same indwelling principle teaching today.

Mesmerism itself arrived in America in the early nineteenth century as a claimed medical practice built around manipulating this supposed universal force to relieve illness, and its later blending with Christian healing narratives, especially through the New England mental healer Phineas Quimby, is the specific channel historians identify as carrying Mesmerism's concept of an indwelling universal force directly into the New Thought movement that grew out of Quimby's own students and patients.