New Thought is influenced by Platonism, Swedenborgianism, Hegelianism, Eastern religions like Hinduism, and Transcendentalism. Phineas P. Quimby was a major early influence. The extent of Quimby’s influence on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, was controversial in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Recent evaluations recognize that Quimby was an important stimulus to Eddy’s development, but that Christian Science as it finally emerged was essentially foreign to Quimby’s thought. New Thought adherents do not accept Mary Baker Eddy’s teaching as the final revelation; truth is viewed as continuing revelation, and the movement is essentially positive and optimistic about life and its outcome.

Quimby healed Mary Baker Eddy. She subsequently founded Christian Science and taught the healing method to others, including Emma Curtis Hopkins. Hopkins was such a profound teacher that she was dubbed the “Teacher of Teachers.” Her teaching method influenced the people who later established their own New Thought movements, including Melinda Cramer and Nona Brooks (who co-founded Divine Science), Ernest Holmes (who founded Religious Science), and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (who co-founded Unity).

In 1882, she went to Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science) because she was ill. She was healed. She then devoted herself to the study and growth of the Christian Science approach. Among those influenced by Emma Curtis Hopkins were Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who established the Unity School of Christianity, and Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science.

The contemporary New Thought movement is a loosely allied group of religious denominations, authors, philosophers, and individuals who share a set of beliefs concerning metaphysics, positive thinking, the law of attraction, healing, life force, creative visualization, and personal power. New Thought holds that Infinite Intelligence, or God, is everywhere, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect. Prentice Mulford, through writing "Your Forces and How to Use Them" (1886–1892), was pivotal in the development of New Thought thinking, including the Law of Attraction. In 1906, William Walker Atkinson wrote and published "Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World."

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (born February 16, 1802, Lebanon, New Hampshire, U.S.—died January 16, 1866, Belfast, Maine) was an American exponent of mental healing who is generally regarded as the **founder of the New Thought movement**, a religio-metaphysical healing cult. He became a controversial figure when **Mary Baker Eddy**, who had sought him out for treatment and had been for a time a disciple, **denied that her discovery of Christian Science was influenced by him**. The Romanticism of the 19th century also influenced the **New Thought movement**, of which Phineas P. Quimby (1802–66) is usually cited as the earliest proponent.

Eddy was the first to establish a lasting organization despite repeated dissension. There has been significant controversy over whether Mrs. Eddy's healing methods are derived from Quimby or are her own discovery. Regardless of the validity of these criticisms, she is credited with the development of New Thought in three ways. White, Judah and Albanese agree that Eddy utilized more Christian categories than any other metaphysical organization in her teachings.

Eddy was regularly criticized by men for being a woman engaged in Biblical interpretation, but her book and her ideas were incredibly popular. There were practitioners of non-Christian new religious movements, like New Thought and Theosophy, who appreciated the teachings of Christian Science, although Eddy, being a devout Christian, did not appreciate them.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (February 16, 1802 – January 16, 1866) was an American folk healer, mentalist and mesmerist. His work is **widely recognized as foundational to the New Thought spiritual movement**. Quimby is sometimes identified as the "**founder of New Thought**," but his actual influence is **debated**. Since Quimby's writings were not available until Dresser's *The Quimby Manuscripts* in 1921, **they did not directly affect New Thought's development during its formative period**.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866) was a non-medical practitioner, **known for his impact on what came to be known as the New Thought movement**. Quimby believed that **thoughts could be condensed into matter, so that an illness could be created by thought and therefore could be reversed by thought as well**. Quimby certainly had a role in American history. And, while it is always difficult to determine exactly what influence one person has had on another, he **likely influenced Eddy as she watched him working as a professional non-medical healer**. A strong promoter of this narrative, Horatio Dresser would later write the most influential histories of Quimby and New Thought, presenting a Quimby healing theory and methodology that were artificially altered to make them appear to be closer in tone and language to the teachings of Christian Science.

Credit for founding the New Thought movement as we know it today is generally given to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a Maine clockmaker who developed a method of spiritual healing he called ‘mind cure’ after experiencing his own spontaneous healing of tuberculosis. One of his patients was Mary Baker Eddy, who brought New Thought ideas to public attention when she incorporated them in the Christian Science Church she founded in 1879. Many thinkers later helped shape and popularize the movement, including Emma Curtis Hopkins, Thomas Troward, Emmet Fox, Ralph Waldo Trine, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore and Dr. Ernest Holmes.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy were pivotal figures in the development of New Thought principles, which significantly influenced later religious and metaphysical movements in America. Their teachings, though distinct, shared core ideas and had an impact on later figures such as E.W. Kenyon. Mary Baker Eddy, once a patient and student of Quimby, later founded Christian Science. While she built on some of Quimby’s ideas, she developed them into a distinct religious system.

Additionally, New Thought has influenced contemporary New Age philosophies, including concepts like positive thinking and the law of attraction. Many of the New Age ideas of the early twenty-first century are based on the basic premise of New Thought, from hypnotherapy, the laws of attraction, the power of positive thinking espoused by Norman Vincent Peale, and the prosperity gospel, to the writings of thinkers such as Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and Eckhart Tolle. New Thought posits that thoughts can influence physical health and personal circumstances, making mental discipline a key to healing and prosperity.

Although New Spirituality draws from a wide range of traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Native American Spirituality, and Western occult practices, it is rooted in New Thought, a movement which grew out of the work of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866). New Thought teachers emphasized creative visualization, such as the use of strong mental images to promote healing, psychological or social wellness, and the use of affirmations to create a positive mindset which would then produce positive results in the external world. This idea leads directly to the Law of Attraction so popular in New Spirituality thinkers today: negative thoughts attract negative conditions to our lives, and positive thoughts positive conditions.

Park Quimby was a watch and clockmaker with a scientific, analytical mind who is **credited by most as being the “Father of New Thought.”** Quimby's work with Burkmar led to his conclusions about the **cause of all illness, the source of error beliefs and the mental basis for healing**. This led Quimby to see that **the cause of disease is an erroneous belief**. Quimby learned that **the mind is not subject to limitations of time or space and, therefore there was a basis for absent treatment**. While his manuscripts were not released until many years after New Thought took root, **Quimby did treat and teach Mary Baker Eddy**, who developed a spiritual basis for healing and may have gotten some of her ideas from Quimby.

Although Mary Baker Eddy was a patient and student of Phineas Quimby’s, Taves identifies the crucial distinction between them through Eddy’s differentiation of her discovery from Quimby’s practices. Janik traces the historical path of mesmerism from Franz Mesmer’s late 18th-century theories on animal magnetism, leading to Phineas Quimby’s mind cure practice, to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement, to New Thought and eventually today’s clinical psychology. The derivation of psychotherapy is examined through the contributions of 19th-century American mind-cure movements and personalities such as Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, New Thought, Christian Science, and the Emmanuel Movement.

The roots of modern manifestation can be traced back to the New Thought movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This philosophical movement emphasized the power of positive thinking and the idea that our thoughts and beliefs can shape our experiences. Figures like Phineas Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, and Emma Curtis Hopkins were instrumental in developing these ideas, which later influenced the self-help and personal development movements.

While people who write about **New Thought** give it a hundred mothers and fathers, I think we can actually start with **Phineas Quimby**. While there are others that came before, the way he put it together seems to earn him the title as a **critical founding parent**. Among those attracted to his theories and practices were **Annetta and Julius Dresser and Mary Baker Eddy**. After Quimby’s death Annetta and Julius began teaching the “Quimby System of Mental Treatment of Diseases” while **Mary Baker Eddy began the Church of Christ, Science, the Christian Science movement**. Dr Dresser would also provide a seven point summary of Phineas Quimby’s teachings, including that **spiritual matter, or fine interpenetrating substance, is directly responsive to thought and subconsciously embodies in the flesh the fears, beliefs, hopes, errors, and joys of the mind**.

Mary Baker Eddy was a prominent American religious leader, best known for founding the Christian Science movement and for her influential work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Eddy’s teachings emphasized the importance of spiritual understanding in achieving physical healing. Despite facing criticism and personal challenges, Eddy's dedication to her beliefs and teachings has left a lasting impact on American religious history.

When Mary Baker Eddy discovered Christian Science in 1866 and later gave her discovery to the world in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she cut sharply across many accepted standards of thought and conduct. Her discovery that all is divine Mind and its manifestation as idea had a shocking impact upon the materially-minded; yet to the open-minded it came as release from the choking cords of matter limitation.

The New Thought Movement started in the late 19th century. At the time, it had a huge impact on how people viewed spirituality and personal growth. It was at that time that thought leaders started emphasizing the power of your mind and its ability to affect all areas of your life. At the core of this movement is the Law of Attraction. It states that the energy from your thoughts attracts similar vibes from the universe. Proponents of this movement believe in the power of the human mind and its ability to shape and change your reality.

Well, in the 19th century we saw a surge of various "spiritual" movements, many of which would form the underpinnings of what would become New Age religion. One of these movements was called New Thought and it put an emphasis on something called "mind-power," or the ability of our thoughts to shape the world around us. Proponents of this religion believed that thinking the "right way" could cure and prevent illness. Over time, people began to reason that if the way we think could affect our health, surely it could also affect our material situation. They came up with the Law of Attraction which says that we can use affirmations and visualizations to affect change in our lives.

Mary Baker Eddy (née Baker; July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) was an American religious leader and author, who in 1879 founded The Church of Christ, Scientist. Eddy showed extensive familiarity with Spiritualist practice, but she denounced it in later Christian Science writings.

Another offshoot of the New Thought movement, which was mostly spread by Quimby's writings, is the law of attraction, which is essentially the teaching that your thoughts create your reality. Quimby taught that illness was the result of erroneous beliefs and that correcting one's thinking could bring about healing. This emphasis on mental causation in health and life circumstances became a central pillar for later Law of Attraction teachings.

Modern manifestation practices have evolved from the New Thought movement and the law of attraction, emphasizing the power of positive thinking and intention. Napoleon Hill’s "Think and Grow Rich" (1937) introduced the concept of the law of attraction to a wide audience, popularizing the idea that our thoughts and beliefs can attract corresponding outcomes into our lives. In these modern teachings, focusing on positive thoughts and beliefs is said to lead to positive results in areas such as wealth, success, and happiness, while negative thoughts can manifest undesirable outcomes.

For more than a century, people have been told that **Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was the father of New Thought, the one who discovered Mind Cure and inspired Emma Curtis Hopkins, Warren Felt Evans, Julius and Annetta Dresser, and other leaders of the movement**. There are many who still think Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was the father of the New Thought movement and mind cure. That would place Evans among a series of **patient-students that Quimby had attracted**. Among the others about whom we know were **Mary Baker Eddy, who later founded Christian Science, and Julius Dresser and Annetta Seabury, who as a married couple eventually became major New Thought leaders in the Boston area**. The article argues, however, that Warren Felt Evans developed mind cure largely independently and that later New Thought accounts overstated Quimby’s centrality.