A Formless Substance That Thinks: Wattles' Own Method

Wallace D. Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich as a practical manual, not a work of philosophy, though it rests on a specific metaphysical claim. He held that a formless, thinking substance underlies all matter, and that a person's definite, faith filled thought impresses that substance and causes it to take the form the thinker pictures, a mechanism he called the Certain Way. Wattles presented the claim not as speculation but as something he had tested and applied to his own finances before writing the book, and he directed readers to a specific practice: hold a clear mental picture of what is wanted, act with gratitude as though it were already granted, and take every action available today rather than waiting for ideal conditions.

The book explicitly set itself apart from the charity and renunciation strand of Christian teaching about wealth, arguing instead that poverty served no one and that becoming rich by the Certain Way was itself an act in harmony with universal increase rather than competition against other people for a fixed supply. Wattles had studied Hegel and Emerson before arriving at his own synthesis, and the book's seventeen short chapters read as a condensed, applied version of New Thought's core premise, that mind is causally primary over matter, aimed narrowly at one outcome: money.