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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Thoughts are Things," Prentice Mulford presents a profound exploration of the transformative power of thoughts, blending philosophical inquiry with practical advice. Written in the late 19th century during the rise of New Thought philosophy, the book employs a conversational and accessible style, enabling readers to grasp complex ideas about the mind'Äôs influence over reality. Mulford articulates the premise that one's thoughts shape personal experience, urging readers to cultivate positive thinking as a means of manifesting desired outcomes in their lives. Through vivid examples and engaging anecdotes, he invites readers to reflect on the significance of their mental habits and emotional states. Prentice Mulford, an influential figure in the New Thought movement, was known for his unconventional views on the human mind and spirit. His own life experiences'Äîincluding struggles with health and finance'Äîdeeply informed his belief in the power of thought and manifestation. Mulford'Äôs writings emerged in a period marked by skepticism toward traditional religion, as many seekers turned to alternative philosophies that sought to empower the individual. "Thoughts are Things" is essential reading for anyone interested in the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and self-improvement. Mulford's insights encourage personal development and inspire transformative action, making this work not only historically significant but also timelessly relevant for modern readers seeking to harness their mental potential. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Thoughts are Things
Table of Contents
Introduction
The mind can be treated as a private sanctuary or as a force that shapes outward life. Prentice Mulford’s Thoughts are Things stands as a landmark of American metaphysical self-help writing, a work more essayistic than novelistic and aimed at everyday readers rather than specialists. Written in a plain, exhortative voice typical of its era, it belongs to a late nineteenth-century current of popular thought that treated mental habits as practical tools. The setting is not a place so much as the reader’s daily circumstances, addressed directly and insistently as the field where ideas become consequences.
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Rather than presenting a plot, Mulford offers a series of reflections that build a premise: thoughts are active, formative, and contagious in their effects on character and conduct. The reading experience is conversational and admonitory, moving by assertion, illustration, and repeated emphasis rather than by formal argument. You are asked to observe yourself closely, to treat inner speech and expectation as causes, and to revise them deliberately. The tone alternates between confident encouragement and stern warning, insisting that mental discipline is not merely a private comfort but an ethical and practical responsibility that can be practiced immediately.
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The work’s central concern is the relationship between inward life and outward action. Mulford writes as if a person’s habitual attitudes are not incidental decorations of the self but the foundations of decision, stamina, and social behavior. In this framework, fear, resentment, and defeat are not only feelings but patterns that can harden into fate, while courage, steadiness, and constructive expectation are presented as learnable capacities. The book repeatedly turns the reader from abstract reflection to personal application, urging an active stance toward one’s own mind as a craft to be worked on daily rather than a mood to be endured.
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A second, closely linked theme is attention: what one dwells upon is treated as what one becomes. Mulford emphasizes the cumulative power of repetition—how a thought entertained once may fade, but a thought rehearsed becomes a habit, and a habit becomes a guiding bias. The text’s method is to redirect attention from complaint to intention, from passive rumination to chosen focus. Even when a reader disagrees with particular claims, the psychological insight that attention shapes perception and behavior remains recognizable, making the book feel less like a relic and more like an early, energetic attempt to describe mental training for ordinary life circumstances and pressures today as well as then.
Synopsis
Prentice Mulford’s Thoughts are Things is a nineteenth-century New Thought–style work that argues for a practical link between mental states and lived outcomes. Written as a sequence of short, essay-like sections rather than a single linear narrative, it develops an overarching claim: thoughts are not merely private impressions but forces that shape perception, character, and circumstances. Mulford frames the book as guidance for self-direction, aiming to move the reader from passive acceptance of moods, fears, and social pressures toward intentional mental discipline. The opening establishes this premise and sets an instructive, reform-minded tone.
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It then elaborates how habitual thinking patterns become self-reinforcing, affecting confidence, conduct, and the kinds of situations a person is prepared to notice and enter. Mulford emphasizes the cumulative power of repeated ideas and suggests that much suffering and limitation arises from unconsciously rehearsed negativity. He contrasts this with deliberate cultivation of constructive expectancy, proposing that inner attitudes condition both bodily vitality and outward action. The argument proceeds by urging readers to treat mental content as a form of personal environment: something that can be kept orderly or allowed to become polluted. Throughout, the focus remains on mental causation and practical self-management.
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Mulford advances the idea that “mind” operates like a subtle influence in social and personal life, shaping interactions beyond what is said aloud. He explores how fear, suspicion, and resentment can distort judgment and invite conflict, while confidence and goodwill can steady decision-making and widen opportunity. Rather than presenting a strict system, he offers a set of linked observations intended to be tested in daily conduct. The book repeatedly returns to the importance of guarding attention—what one dwells on, anticipates, or continually imagines—because these tendencies become the unspoken script behind choices and habits.
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As the essays continue, Mulford shifts toward the moral and practical implications of his thesis. He warns against surrendering one’s mind to prevailing discouragement, fashionable cynicism, or the opinions of domineering personalities. Self-reliance, in his view, depends on maintaining an inner stance that is not easily invaded by worry or social contagion. He also addresses the attraction of goals and the pursuit of improvement, suggesting that clear purpose and sustained belief help organize effort and persistence. The guidance remains broadly prescriptive, emphasizing inner regulation as a foundation for outward success and steadiness under pressure.
Historical Context
Prentice Mulford wrote the essays later collected as Thoughts Are Things in the United States during the late nineteenth century, when rapid industrial growth, westward migration, and expanding mass print culture reshaped public life. Mulford (1834–1891), born in New York and later active in San Francisco, worked as a journalist and humorist and published widely in periodicals. The book’s ideas circulated in an environment where lectures, magazines, and inexpensive books helped popularize self-help, reform, and religious debate. Mulford’s emphasis on mental causation and personal agency reflects this broader culture of improvement literature and public moral instruction.
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By the 1870s and 1880s, San Francisco and other American cities supported thriving newspapers and publishing networks that linked the West Coast to eastern markets. Mulford’s career in journalism coincided with a period when print outlets regularly blended entertainment with instruction, including columns on health, morals, and success. Public fascination with character building and “mind” disciplines was reinforced by lecture circuits and lyceum-style venues, which hosted speakers on religion, science, and reform. Mulford’s prose style—direct, exhortative, and addressed to the everyday reader—fits a commercial literary marketplace where authors competed for attention by offering practical guidance for modern anxieties.
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Thoughts Are Things also belongs to the wider transatlantic history of “New Thought,” a loosely organized movement that developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century and stressed the power of mental states in shaping health and circumstances. Key early figures included Phineas P. Quimby (1802–1866), whose healing practice and writings influenced later mental-healing currents. Although New Thought was not a single institution, it spread through lectures, correspondence, and small presses, and it interacted with earlier American traditions of religious individualism. Mulford’s essays are frequently cited as early articulations of mental causation in popular form during this formative period.
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Mulford’s work appeared alongside contested discussions of religion and science in post–Civil War America. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the growth of professional science intensified debates about materialism, morality, and human nature. At the same time, many Americans sought forms of spirituality compatible with modern life, including liberal Protestant currents, spiritualism, and metaphysical healing movements. Mulford’s language often reframes spiritual and moral ideas in quasi-natural terms, emphasizing “law” and “forces” rather than church doctrine. This approach reflects an era when writers frequently borrowed scientific vocabulary to lend authority to moral and religious claims.
paragraphs=","paragraphs">Health reform and alternative healing provide another important context. Nineteenth-century America saw strong interest in hydropathy, diet reform, mesmerism, and other nonconventional practices, partly because professional medicine was still uneven in quality and access. Mental healing and mind-cure theories attracted readers who linked illness to emotions, habits, and environment. Mulford’s insistence on the bodily effects of mental states aligns with this broader reform milieu, which also promoted self-control and temperance. His writing assumes a reader concerned with nervous strain and personal vitality—common themes in an urbanizing society where new work rhythms and social pressures were widely discussed in popular literature and advice manuals." ,"paragraphs":"The book also reflects economic and social mobility ideals associated with the “self-made” tradition. In the Gilded Age, widening disparities of wealth coexisted with influential narratives that success could be achieved through character, diligence, and right thinking. Popular authors such as Samuel Smiles in Britain and later American success writers helped consolidate an ethic of personal responsibility that appealed to a growing middle class. Mulford’s emphasis on inner attitude as a driver of outward conditions fits this culture of striving. Yet it also shifts attention from institutions toward individual mental discipline, mirroring a common tendency in self-help literature of the period." ,"paragraphs":"Mulford’s essays circulated before the New Thought movement became more formally organized through later associations, churches, and publishing enterprises in the 1890s and early twentieth century. His death in 1891 preceded the wide institutional expansion of mental-science groups, but the ideas he popularized persisted through reprints and anthologies. The durability of Thoughts Are Things owed much to inexpensive distribution and the continuing demand for practical metaphysical instruction. Readers encountered these essays as part of a growing genre that blended moral exhortation, spiritualized psychology, and advice on prosperity and health—an emergent style that would influence later American metaphysical and motivational writing." ,"paragraphs":"Taken together, the historical context clarifies how Thoughts Are Things reflects and critiques its era. It channels late nineteenth-century confidence in progress and law-like order while responding to uncertainties created by rapid social change. Mulford’s insistence that thought shapes experience echoes the period’s attraction to self-culture and alternative spirituality, and it leverages the authority of scientific-sounding language typical of post-Darwinian public discourse. At the same time, by placing decisive power in individual mentality, the work implicitly downplays structural constraints that were increasingly visible in industrial society. Its enduring appeal lies in how it distilled contemporary metaphysical currents into accessible, directive prose." ]} }} சம்பOops JSON messed. Need fix. Provide valid JSON with exactly 8 strings. Let's output clean.
Thoughts are Things
Chapter 1 THE MATERIAL MIND vs THE SPIRITUAL MIND
THERE belongs to every human being a higher self and a lower self‐‐a self or mind of the spirit which has been growing for ages, and a self of the body, which is but a thing of yesterday. The higher self is full of prompting idea, suggestion and aspiration. This it receives of the Supreme Power. All this the lower or animal self regards as wild and visionary. The higher self argues possibilities and power for us greater than men and women now possess and enjoy. The lower self says we can only live and exist as men and women have lived and existed before us. The higher self craves freedom from the cumbrousness, the limitations, the pains and disabilities of the body. The lower self says that we are born to them, born to ill, born to suffer, and must suffer as have so many before us. The higher self wants a standard for right and wrong of its own. The lower self says we must accept a standard made for us by others‐‐by general and long-held opinion, belief and prejudice.
“To thine own self be true[1]” is an oft-uttered adage. But to which self? The higher or lower?
You have in a sense two minds‐‐the mind of the body and the mind of the spirit[1q]. Spirit is a force and a mystery. All we know or may ever know of it is that it exists, and is ever working and producing all results in physical things seen of physical sense and many more not so seen.
What is seen, of any object, a tree, an animal, a stone, a man is only a part of that tree, animal, stone, or man. There is a force which for a time binds such objects together in the form you see them. That force is always acting on them to greater or lesser degree. It builds up the flower to its fullest maturity. Its cessation to act on the flower or tree causes what we call decay. It is constantly changing the shape of all forms of what are called organized matter. An animal, a plant, a human being are not in physical shape this month or this year what they will be next month or next year.
This ever-acting, ever-varying force, which lies behind and, in a sense, creates all forms of matter we call Spirit.
To see, reason and judge of life and things in the knowledge of this force makes what is termed the “Spiritual Mind.”
