If you have read or watched Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, you have, indirectly, read Wallace Wattles. Byrne has said in dozens of interviews that the entire project began when her daughter handed her a copy of Wattles' 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich. Almost every concept in The Secret — the Law of Attraction, the "ask, believe, receive" structure, the gratitude practice, the visualization technique — is in Wattles, in close paraphrase of his exact words, written ninety-six years earlier.

And yet, Wattles himself died in obscurity. He sold fewer copies of his book during his lifetime than the average self-published author today sells in a month. He passed away the year after publication, in 1911, in a small Tennessee town, at the age of 50.

This page introduces who he was, what he actually wrote, and why the modern reader should go back to him directly.

Biography

Wallace Delois Wattles was born in Illinois in 1860 to a farm family of modest means. His formal education ended early — by his teens, he was working farm hands' work while reading whatever books he could borrow. By his late twenties, he had read deeply in Hegel, Emerson, the New England Transcendentalists, and the entire New Thought tradition that had been building in America since Phineas Quimby's work in the 1830s and '40s.

He spent his adult life as a writer and lecturer on the New Thought circuit — never famous, never wealthy. He was a committed Christian Socialist who ran for political office twice (1908 and 1910) on the Socialist Party ticket. He lost both elections.

His daughter Florence, in a memoir written after his death, described his daily practice: each morning he would form a clear mental image of the success he intended, hold it for an extended period of focused attention, accept the image as already fulfilled, and then act, throughout the day, as the man to whom it was true. He died in 1911 in Tennessee, at age 50.

His Books

Wattles left behind five short books:

The middle three — the "Science" trilogy — are the work for which he is remembered. Science of Getting Rich is the most read and the most directly responsible for his outsized posthumous influence.

The Central Claim

Wattles' opening claim in Science of Getting Rich is uncompromising and immediate. There is, he says, an underlying intelligent substance from which all visible things are formed. A thought, held in that substance, produces the thing thought of. A person who learns the technique of impressing definite thoughts upon this substance — and who lives, simultaneously, in a particular practical manner he calls "a Certain Way" — can produce, with the regularity of any physical science, the financial outcomes she wants.

His three foundational propositions, repeated and developed throughout the book:

  1. There is a Thinking Substance from which all things are made, which, in its original state, permeates and fills the interspaces of the universe.
  2. A thought in this Substance produces the thing imaged by the thought.
  3. A person can form things in her own thought, and, by impressing those thoughts upon the formless Substance, can cause the thing imagined to be created.

The "Certain Way"

The phrase Wattles uses for the lived practice of his method is "acting in a Certain Way." It has four components:

1. A definite mental image. Specific, sensory, complete. Not "wealth" but a particular house with particular furnishings. The image must be detailed enough to describe to a stranger.

2. Gratitude. After forming the image, give thanks — not for what you hope to receive, but for what you have, in your certainty, already received. Gratitude is what signals to the Thinking Substance that the image has been accepted as fact.

3. Will, directed only inward. Never use will or force on other people, on circumstances, or on outcomes. Will is for holding the image, returning to it when distracted, and acting from it.

4. Action in the present, complete and unhurried. Every action of the day done in the spirit of the image — not as preparation for the future but as the present life of the person to whom the image is already true.

What The Secret Took From Him

Almost every concept that The Secret popularized has its direct equivalent in The Science of Getting Rich:

For a fuller treatment of what The Secret specifically softened from Wattles, see our page on The Secret's source material.

What Wattles Got Wrong

A fair page on Wattles requires this section.

He was, in places, wrong. His confidence in the universal applicability of his method led him to claim, repeatedly, that anyone who follows the rules will get rich, with the regularity of a scientific law. The historical record of his readers does not support this at full strength.

He also held the view, common in his era, that physical disease is essentially a mental error. His sequel volume Science of Being Well (1910) advanced that view in a form most modern readers will find untenable. His own death the following year, at age 50, complicates the claims of that book.

The honest position: Wattles' method does what it does. It produces, in a meaningful number of serious practitioners, real and durable changes in financial life. It does not produce miracles on demand.

Why Read Wattles Directly

Three reasons.

It's short. 30,000 words. Seventeen short chapters. Two hours of reading. The single best return on time-investment in this entire genre.

It's free. Public domain since 1986. Available in dozens of editions on Project Gutenberg, Wikisource, and anywhere else public-domain texts live.

It's the source. Almost everything you've encountered in modern manifestation literature traces back to this book. Reading it directly is the most efficient way to understand the entire field.

A practical recommendation: read it in a single sitting, then again the following week, then again the following month. The third reading is, for most serious students, the one that lands.

Where Wattles Fits in the Tradition

Wattles is the seed of the modern manifestation tradition, but he is not the whole tradition.

Five other major figures developed the same underlying mechanism into different — and in some cases more powerful — techniques:

Reading any one of them is good. Reading all six, in proper context, is what the whole tradition was supposed to deliver before the modern publishing industry chopped it up and sold the pieces separately.