Holmes and the Science of Mind

Ernest Holmes published The Science of Mind in 1926 after more than a decade studying and lecturing on mental healing, New Thought teaching and comparative religious philosophy, and founded the Institute of Religious Science the following year to teach the system the book laid out. Its central practice, spiritual mind treatment, is an affirmative form of prayer that Holmes distinguished sharply from petition: rather than asking an external deity to intervene, the practitioner is trained to declare and affirm a desired condition as already spiritually true, on the premise that a universal creative Mind responds to and manifests directed thought.

Holmes drew openly on Ralph Waldo Emerson, on earlier New Thought writers including Phineas Quimby's intellectual descendants, and on Hindu and other Indian philosophical sources, and he consistently presented Religious Science as a philosophy anyone could study and apply rather than as a creed requiring formal subscription or exclusive belief, a framing that shaped how loosely organized the movement remained for decades. Holmes had earlier worked as a public lecturer and had studied under and been influenced by Christian Science practitioners and other New Thought teachers active in early twentieth century Southern California, a milieu that shaped the eclectic, synthesizing character of the system he eventually published rather than one drawn from a single earlier source.