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.
“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.
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.
Odd Enough Books does not currently have a Mulford title catalogued for sale. The Prentice Mulford collection is being maintained as a research and acquisition 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.
Continue with the Mind Magnet reading map to follow those ideas into Towne, Atkinson, Troward, Haanel, Shinn, Neville, and beyond.
C.K. Lee
