Prentice Mulford and the Idea That Thoughts Are Things
Before New Thought had fully settled into an organized movement, Prentice Mulford was already writing about the power of habitual thinking, invisible influence, health, courage, character, prosperity, and the strange possibility that thoughts possess consequences extending beyond private consciousness.
Mulford lived from 1834 to 1891. His writing emerged from an unusually varied life that included years in California and work in journalism before his later essays turned increasingly toward spiritual and mental laws. Unlike later system-builders, he often wrote as an essayist: exploratory, personal, humorous, and sometimes deliberately provocative.
California as an Apprenticeship
Mulford’s later metaphysics grew out of experience rather than a seminary or an academic system. In 1856 he sailed for California, then spent years moving among maritime work, mining districts, teaching, local politics, and journalism. The sequence matters: before he wrote about conserving attention and directing thought, he had lived through occupations defined by risk, unstable income, physical fatigue, and reinvention.
His California writing included work for the literary weekly The Golden Era. That journalistic apprenticeship helps explain the texture of his later essays. They proceed by scene, analogy, comic reversal, and remembered incident more often than by formal deduction. Mulford’s “laws” of mind are frequently arguments discovered through storytelling.
The posthumously collected Life by Land and Sea (1889) is therefore more than colorful background. It is a primary source for the working life from which his philosophy emerged: travel by ship, prospecting, camp life, teaching, and the transition to authorship.
“Thoughts Are Things”
The phrase most closely associated with Mulford is also the title of one of his best-known pieces: Thoughts Are Things. For him, the statement was more than a motivational metaphor. Thought was treated as an active force capable of shaping health, relationships, conduct, atmosphere, and circumstance.
Modern readers may recognize the phrase as an ancestor of later “law of attraction” language, but reducing Mulford to that formula flattens his work. His essays are equally concerned with fear, resentment, courage, self-respect, social influence, physical vitality, work, rest, and the moral quality of one’s inner life.
Your Forces and How to Use Them
Mulford’s essays were collected under the title Your Forces and How to Use Them, with material appearing during the final years of his life and continuing in collected form afterward. The title captures his characteristic assumption: human beings possess capacities they habitually dissipate through fear, worry, imitation, and unconscious mental habits.
His proposed remedy was not merely positive thinking. It was greater awareness of what the mind repeatedly rehearses and what kinds of influences a person admits into consciousness.
Before the System Builders
Mulford is especially revealing when placed before figures such as Elizabeth Towne, William Walker Atkinson, and Charles F. Haanel.
Towne represents New Thought as a mature publishing movement. Atkinson turns mental power into a sprawling body of manuals and pseudonymous systems. Haanel organizes mental development into a sequential correspondence course. Mulford belongs to an earlier, looser phase when much of the vocabulary was still being discovered in essays rather than standardized into lessons.
Thought, Health, and Character
Mulford repeatedly links mental habits with bodily states. Such claims belong to the metaphysical medicine of his era and should not be confused with modern clinical evidence. Historically, however, they are important because they show how deeply questions of health and consciousness were intertwined within early New Thought.
A distinction is essential here. Attention, expectation, and habitual emotion can affect behavior and subjective experience, but Mulford’s stronger claims about thought as an externally acting substance were metaphysical propositions, not findings established by controlled biomedical or physical research.
He also treats character as an atmosphere generated over time. Courage, confidence, generosity, suspicion, fear, and resentment become habits that affect how a person encounters the world and how others respond. Even when his invisible-force explanations are set aside, this attention to habitual mental posture helps explain his enduring appeal.
Where to Begin with Prentice Mulford
Begin with Thoughts Are Things, then move into the broader Your Forces and How to Use Them material. Read him as an early voice rather than as a polished representative of later New Thought orthodoxy. His value is precisely that the movement’s ideas are still fluid in his hands.
The Prentice Mulford collection is being maintained as a research, bibliographical, and Holographic Pagan Press archive.
Why Mulford Still Matters
Mulford helps push the history backward. Ideas that later appear as mental science, personal power, attraction, autosuggestion, and mind cure did not emerge suddenly in the twentieth century. His essays show many of those concerns already circulating in the 1880s.
Primary Sources and Image Provenance
The principal period sources used here are Mulford’s Your Forces and How to Use Them (volume one, 1888) and the autobiographical Life by Land and Sea (1889). Both cited scans are public-domain library copies preserved through the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons. The San Francisco daguerreotype is a public-domain Library of Congress image. All six pre-existing article images have been retained unchanged.
Place Mulford within the permanent Historical Map →
C.K. Lee
