Wallace D. Wattles and the Science of Creative Action

Wallace D. Wattles is often reduced to a single title: The Science of Getting Rich. That book deserves its reputation, but read in isolation it can make Wattles look narrower than he was. His 1909–1911 writings form a compact New Thought program concerned with truth, prosperity, health, character, action, and the disciplined relation between thought and circumstance.

More Than a Prosperity Book

The famous formula of The Science of Getting Rich belongs to a larger argument. Wattles repeatedly insists that thought must become purposeful action. Wealth, health, and personal greatness are not presented simply as rewards for wishing; they are linked to attention, conduct, efficiency, service, and what he describes as creative rather than competitive activity.

The New Thought Publishing World

Wattles wrote within the practical New Thought culture of the early twentieth century, where metaphysical ideas circulated through magazines, lectures, correspondence, and small independent publishers. Elizabeth Towne’s publishing world is especially important to understanding the 1910 books: Wattles belongs beside writers who turned metaphysical philosophy into direct instruction for ordinary readers.

The Nautilus was more than a backdrop. What Is Truth? appeared through its pages in 1909, and Towne’s company issued Wattles’s best-known practical works. The material form of that network—subscriptions, bundled books, advertisements, and reprints—helps explain how a writer with a short late career acquired a long afterlife.

What Is Truth? — 1909

The 1909 series What Is Truth? provides useful groundwork for the better-known books that followed. It is concerned with the nature of truth, the relation between thought and reality, and the spiritual assumptions beneath Wattles’s practical teaching. Read first, it makes the later sequence feel less like disconnected self-help and more like an applied philosophy.

The Science of Getting Rich — 1910

The Science of Getting Rich is Wattles’s most durable book because it compresses his method into a startlingly direct argument: cultivate a definite mental orientation, act effectively in the present environment, and seek increase through creation rather than struggle over scarcity. Its language is unmistakably of its New Thought moment, yet its emphasis on purposeful action is one reason it has remained influential far beyond that movement.

The Science of Being Well — 1910

The Science of Being Well applies the same metaphysical framework to health. Its claims belong to early-twentieth-century New Thought and should be read historically rather than as modern medical guidance. What matters for the history of the movement is the consistency of Wattles’s system: thought, habit, conduct, and spiritual law are again treated as parts of one disciplined practice.

The Science of Being Great — 1911

The Science of Being Great turns from prosperity and health toward character. A surviving copyright statement dates the work to January 1911, so this archive treats 1911 as the defensible edition date rather than simply grouping it with Wattles’s two 1910 “Science” books. Greatness is framed less as celebrity or domination than as self-command, principled action, service, and the development of a larger personality.

Christian Socialism and the Missing Political Context

Wattles’s language of wealth can sound like a celebration of private accumulation when detached from the rest of his life. Yet he also wrote about Jesus through a socialist lens and stood as a Socialist Party candidate in Indiana: for the Eighth Congressional District in 1908 and for prosecuting attorney in Madison County in 1910. He lost both races, but the candidacies show that his “creative” commonwealth was political as well as personal.

This context changes the meaning of his contrast between competition and creation. It does not erase the books’ individualism or guarantee a coherent economic program, but it makes clear that “getting rich” was embedded in a moral critique of scarcity, domination, and social arrangements—not merely in a technique for personal gain.

Creative Action, Not Competition

The most useful thread through Wattles is his contrast between the creative and competitive modes. Whether the subject is money, health, or character, he wants the reader to stop organizing life around fear of scarcity and rivalry and instead to work from a conviction of possibility, increase, and constructive action. That idea places him squarely within New Thought while also giving his books a recognizable voice of their own.

Towne’s firm continued to market practical New Thought as a connected library rather than as isolated titles. That catalog strategy placed Wattles among books on health, self-command, relationships, and prosperity, making his work part of a repeatable reading program.

What “Science” Meant in Wattles’s Titles

Wattles used “science” to mean a universal, orderly method whose results he believed would follow from correct thought and action. His books did not report controlled experiments, and the title word should not be mistaken for modern scientific validation. The health claims in The Science of Being Well are historical New Thought doctrine, not medical guidance; the prosperity claims are moral-metaphysical instruction, not an evidence-based investment or economic strategy.

Where to Begin

Begin with The Science of Getting Rich for Wattles at his most concise and influential. Follow with The Science of Being Great (1911) to see the ethical and character-building side of the system, then The Science of Being Well for its historical extension into New Thought health teaching. Return to What Is Truth? for the philosophical foundation beneath all three.

Explore the Wallace D. Wattles collection →

Place Wattles within the permanent Historical Map →

Why Wallace D. Wattles Matters

Wattles matters because he demonstrates how completely New Thought could be translated into a practical program. In a remarkably small body of late work, metaphysical assumptions about mind and universal law become instructions about work, money, health, conduct, character, and purposeful action. Reading the books together restores that larger project.

Primary Sources and Image Provenance

The edition chronology is checked against the original publication matter reproduced above and the public-domain texts of What Is Truth? and The Science of Getting Rich. Wattles’s candidacies are recorded in period Indiana election reporting and later historical scholarship on the state Socialist Party. The three added images are public-domain archival material, credited in their captions.

C.K. Lee