The Science of Mind

Ernest Holmes first published The Science of Mind in 1926, drawing together several strands he had encountered across a broad reading life: New England Transcendentalism, Christian Science's teaching on the primacy of mind over material circumstance, comparative material on Hinduism and other world religions, and the wider New Thought movement that had grown since the nineteenth century out of the mental healing practice of Phineas Quimby. Rather than presenting this synthesis as a devotional scripture in the traditional sense, Holmes wrote it as a systematic textbook, organized into a philosophy section, a section on faith, and a practical treatment section, meant to be studied and applied rather than simply read. Its central teaching holds that a single universal creative Mind, sometimes described as Law, underlies all experience, and that an individual's own thought and belief engage and direct that Mind, expressed practically through a structured contemplative practice Holmes called spiritual mind treatment, intended to change circumstances by first changing the thought held about them. Holmes described the practice as working through a definite, structured sequence of recognition, unification, realization, thanksgiving and release, presenting spiritual mind treatment as a repeatable technique rather than as an occasional devotional exercise.

Holmes founded the Institute of Religious Science to teach and apply the system his book laid out, an organization that developed over subsequent decades into Religious Science International and, after a later merger of separate Religious Science bodies, the United Centers for Spiritual Living, known today as Centers for Spiritual Living. Holmes himself revised and expanded the text during his own lifetime, and later editions reflect that ongoing authorial development rather than a single fixed 1926 text.

Within Religious Science and Science of Mind congregations, the book functions today as the doctrinal foundation studied in ministerial and lay training alike, occupying a role broadly comparable to the one Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures plays for Christian Science, another mind-centered American new religious movement with roots in the same nineteenth century milieu. The two movements remain historically distinct and diverge on real doctrinal points, including the status they give to Jesus and the degree to which each identifies its teaching with orthodox Christianity at all. Ministers trained within Centers for Spiritual Living today study the text alongside later denominational literature that has grown up around it, treating Holmes's original work as the foundation of an ongoing living tradition rather than a closed historical document.