The movement historians call New Thought emerges in the United States in the nineteenth century from a confluence of religious, medical, and intellectual currents. At least three strands converged: a nineteenth-century fascination with mind cure and mesmerism; a Protestant, often pietistic emphasis on personal religious experience and healing; and an emerging liberal biblical and metaphysical interest in the relationship between thought and material reality. These elements appear together in the life and practice of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a clockmaker-turned-healer whose clinics in Maine and New Hampshire are widely regarded by scholars as formative to later New Thought currents. Quimby experimented with what he described as mental healing in Portland, Maine and later in Belfast, Maine; he articulated a theory that disease had mental causes and that 'right thinking' could heal, an idea that would be taken up and transformed by a host of later teachers.
Quimby's work is both central to the tradition's self-understanding and contested in scholarly accounts. Adherents of many New Thought streams trace direct intellectual descent to Quimby: they point to his notebooks, case records, and the practical results of his cures as foundational. Historical-critical scholars accept Quimby as an important precursor but emphasize that he did not found an enduring, centralized movement himself. Instead, his writings and practices circulated in a wide print culture of metaphysical ideas and were refracted through later figures who organized institutions and published systematic expositions.
The institutional crystallization of New Thought happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, a married couple who had been involved in the Holiness movement, began publishing metaphysical teachings and prayer literature in Kansas City in the 1880s and 1890s; their publications and prayer ministry became the organization now known as Unity (Unity School of Christianity). Ernest Holmes, who worked as an editor and lecturer in Los Angeles, formulated a philosophical system he called ‘‘Science of Mind’’ and published the book The Science of Mind in 1926; his Institute of Religious Science and School of Philosophy provided an organizational home for what would later be called Religious Science (now commonly Centers for Spiritual Living after later institutional mergers).
Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925), often called the "teacher of teachers," played an influential role in transmitting and systematizing New Thought ideas. Hopkins taught classes in Chicago and New York and trained a generation of women who went on to found their own organizations; she acted as an institutional catalyst rather than as a single institutional founder. Hopkins's students included figures who went on to shape independent denominations and organizations, making her an important conduit rather than a centralized originator.
New Thought did not develop in isolation. It belongs to a broader nineteenth-century American religious ecosystem that included revivalism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, Transcendentalism, and fraternal healing societies. Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 1875) and the publication culture around mesmerism and spiritual healing provided both competitors and interlocutors; some New Thought teachers explicitly distanced themselves from Eddy's theology while sharing a popular interest in healing. The late nineteenth-century print marketplace—magazines, pamphlets, and urban lecture circuits—was the medium through which the disparate impulses of Quimby, Hopkins, the Fillmores, and others coalesced into recognizable currents.
A number of local centers and periodicals played key roles in institutionalizing the movement. Unity began publishing periodicals and pamphlets from its early years; Silent Unity, a prayer ministry associated with the Fillmores, became a distinctive organizational practice. The Science of Mind movement established the Institute of Religious Science and School of Philosophy in Los Angeles; its publishing house and lecture circuit helped spread Holmes's language. Intersecting networks—Sunday services, lecture series in urban centers such as Chicago and Boston, and metaphysical bookstores—created the social infrastructure by which New Thought spread.
The movement's early decades also reveal a gendered dimension: women appear prominently as lecturers, organizers, and institutional leaders. Myrtle Fillmore, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and numerous other women were pivotal. Scholars have noted that New Thought's emphasis on personal inner authority and its relatively fluid institutional structures opened space for women to exercise leadership at a time when many mainstream Protestant denominations excluded them from ordained office.
From its beginnings New Thought was plural and contested. Different teachers prioritized different ideas—some emphasized the power of affirmation and prosperity, others focused on mystical union or on healing prayer. The label "New Thought" was applied externally as well as used by adherents; it functioned as a descriptive category for a family of metaphysical approaches rather than a single unified creed. Debates over authorship, influence, and priority—most famously about how directly Quimby's ideas were transmitted to later teachers—have continued in both devotional and scholarly literature.
By the early twentieth century New Thought had produced distinctive institutional legacies: the Unity movement centered around Unity Village, Missouri; the Religious Science movement with its Los Angeles-based school and numerous local centers; and a constellation of independent teachers and small societies publishing pamphlets and offering classes. Academic scholarship treats the nineteenth-century emergence of New Thought as an exemplar of how American religious innovation often works: modest origins in local practices, rapid dissemination through print and lecture culture, and later institutional consolidation into denominational forms.