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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Wallace D. Wattles: The Science of Being Great', the author delves into the practical application of positive thinking and personal development in achieving greatness. Wattles' literary style is characterized by its straightforward and accessible language, making the complex concepts of self-improvement easy to understand for readers from all walks of life. Published in 1910, the book falls within the context of the New Thought movement, which emphasized the power of the mind in shaping one's reality. Wattles explores the principles of success and emphasizes the importance of aligning one's thoughts and actions with their goals. Through examples and exercises, Wattles guides readers on a transformative journey towards personal growth and achievement. As a self-help classic, 'The Science of Being Great' continues to inspire readers to harness their inner potential and strive for greatness. Wallace D. Wattles' own journey from poverty to prosperity serves as a testament to the efficacy of the principles he espouses in the book. Recommended for readers seeking practical wisdom and guidance on personal development and success. 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: 2017
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Wallace D. Wattles: The Science of Being Great
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Table of Contents
Introduction
This book contends that true greatness arises not from accident or privilege but from a disciplined inner posture that steadily turns thought into creative action, insisting that character, focus, and purposeful will can outlast circumstance, redirect habit, and elevate ordinary effort into extraordinary effectiveness while resisting the common drift toward envy, distraction, and resignation, and in doing so it proposes a practical tension between the world as it is and the individual as he or she can deliberately become, a tension resolved through simple, repeatable mental practices directed toward service, self-command, and an unwavering commitment to constructive growth.
Wallace D. Wattles’s The Science of Being Great belongs to the early twentieth-century current of American New Thought, a stream of practical philosophy and spiritual self-help that explored the formative power of ideas on life and conduct. Composed during a period of rapid social change and expanding popular interest in personal improvement, the book functions as a concise manual rather than a historical narrative, presenting its claims in direct, instructional prose. Without relying on institutional authority, it places responsibility with the reader, situating greatness as a learnable discipline within everyday work, relationships, and decision-making, and reflecting the movement’s optimistic, utilitarian emphasis on applied mind training.
The premise is straightforward: by organizing one’s thinking, directing the will, and acting consistently with clearly chosen ideals, a person may develop strength of character that expresses itself as competent, calm, and generous leadership. Wattles writes in the second person with a firm but encouraging voice, using compact chapters and purposeful repetition to reinforce central points. The tone blends moral seriousness with practical optimism, avoiding ornament in favor of clarity and momentum. Readers encounter a sequence of assertions, explanations, and applications that invite immediate practice, making the book feel less like abstract theory and more like a disciplined workshop in self-governance.
At its core are themes of self-mastery, purposeful attention, and the creative use of thought. Greatness, in this account, is not a social ranking but a quality of being that aligns motive, word, and deed toward constructive ends. The text emphasizes calmness under pressure, non-resentful ambition, and the choice to build rather than compete destructively. It urges readers to cultivate clarity of aim, steadiness of will, and habits that harmonize inner conviction with outward service. The result is a philosophy of growth that prizes integrity and usefulness, positioning greatness as an everyday practice available to anyone willing to persist.
Contemporary readers will recognize in these pages a counterweight to distraction, cynicism, and performative success metrics. The framework invites leaders, professionals, and students alike to treat attention as a scarce resource, to cultivate composure amid speed, and to measure advancement by contribution rather than comparison. In workplaces shaped by rapid change, its focus on steady purpose and ethical influence offers a humane model of effectiveness. For those navigating social media pressures or volatile careers, the book’s insistence on inner governance provides a durable compass, translating into better decisions, more reliable habits, and relationships guided by respect and responsibility.
Although its language reflects the optimism and metaphysical assumptions of its era, the book’s method is strikingly pragmatic: adopt a clear ideal, train attention upon it, and act in ways that embody it day by day. Readers need not share every philosophical premise to benefit from the program’s emphasis on steadiness, sincerity, and usefulness. Approached as a practice manual rather than a creed, it rewards slow reading, marginal notes, and deliberate experiment. Its counsel about composure, affirmative focus, and constructive work remains applicable across contexts without requiring specialized tools, elaborate systems, or dependence on external permission to begin.
As an introduction, consider reading with periodic pauses to translate each principle into one specific behavior, noting what you will do differently in the next hour rather than some distant future. The compact chapters invite paced rereading, allowing key ideas to accumulate through application. Attend to the author’s plain diction and rhythmic reiteration, which are designed to steady attention as much as to persuade. Taken on its intended terms—as a concise map for inner discipline expressed in outward service—The Science of Being Great offers a durable, dignifying proposition: that greatness is practiced in ordinary moments and verified by consistent usefulness.
Synopsis
Wallace D. Wattles’ The Science of Being Great presents a compact program for personal mastery within the early twentieth‑century New Thought tradition. Written as a companion to his better‑known work on wealth and to his book on health, it argues that genuine greatness is attainable to any person who aligns thought, character, and action with clear purpose. Wattles frames greatness not as social rank or theatrical heroism, but as the steady expression of one’s highest capacities in everyday affairs. The book proceeds as an argument and manual combined, moving from philosophical premises to habits of mind and practical conduct.
In establishing his foundation, Wattles advances a monistic, theistic metaphysic typical of New Thought: the universe is pervaded by a living, intelligent presence, and human beings participate in this creative power. Greatness develops as a lawful consequence of thinking and acting in harmony with that presence, rather than by coercion or chance. The reader is urged to reject fatalism, resentment, and a worldview of scarcity. Instead, one’s task is to recognize unity, emphasize creative enlargement over rivalry, and adopt a rational faith that the constructive use of mind influences conditions. This framework sets the stage for his specific disciplines of thought and behavior.
Wattles then defines the inner posture required for greatness. Central is a definite purpose held with quiet conviction, supported by gratitude, reverence, and self‑respect. He counsels readers to cease depreciating themselves or others, to refuse anxious or resentful thinking, and to practice a calm will that neither wavers before obstacles nor hardens into stubbornness. The mind is to dwell on possibility and order, not on limitation and disorder, while acknowledging facts without surrendering to them. This disciplined attitude is treated as both ethical and practical, cultivating poise, courage, and initiative that translate into effective choices in work, relationships, and leadership.
Translating mindset into conduct, the book urges what Wattles calls efficient action: doing today’s work thoroughly, courteously, and without haste or procrastination. He emphasizes speaking with dignity, avoiding quarrels and complaint, and meeting opposition with composure rather than contention. Greatness, in his view, emerges through consistent excellence in one’s present sphere, not by waiting for ideal conditions. Readers are encouraged to plan boldly yet act within the immediate moment, unifying intention and deed. This program ties character to productivity, arguing that order, punctuality, and persistent, undramatic effort open channels through which the creative life can express itself in practical results.
Relations with others provide a recurring test of the principles. Wattles maintains that true greatness seeks the good of all and grows by helping others to expand, not by diminishing them. He urges a refusal to engage in envy, backbiting, or aggressive rivalry, proposing instead a cooperative, value‑creating posture in business, community, and family life. Leadership, in this framework, rests on respect and encouragement rather than domination. The reader is asked to see people as capable participants in the same creative life, to keep promises, to deal fairly, and to let influence arise naturally from integrity, mastery, and steady usefulness.
To make the philosophy livable, the text details steady practices that reinforce the central outlook. Readers are directed to cultivate orderly habits, nourish the intellect with purposeful study, strengthen the body through temperance and vigor, and reserve time for quiet reflection. When faced with adverse appearances, one is to persist in constructive action while maintaining confidence in the larger creative order. Throughout, Wattles treats setbacks, antagonism, and self‑doubt as signals to reaffirm purpose and practice composure. The emphasis falls less on dramatic techniques than on unbroken consistency, so that character and competence accumulate and opportunities are met when they appear.
By the close, The Science of Being Great presents a unified vision: greatness as the disciplined, ethical, and creative expression of the individual within a larger, intelligent order. Without leaning on sectarian doctrine, it sets out a practical idealism that connects inner stance to outward effectiveness and links personal advancement with the advancement of others. The book’s lasting significance lies in its synthesis of metaphysical optimism with sober counsel on character and work. As a formative New Thought text and a precursor to later personal‑development literature, it continues to invite readers to test its principles through steady practice and service.
Historical Context
Wallace D. Wattles (1860–1911) wrote The Science of Being Great during the Progressive Era in the United States, a time of rapid industrial growth and reform-minded politics. First issued in 1910 by Elizabeth Towne Company of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the book emerged from the New Thought publishing network built around Towne’s magazine, The Nautilus. Wattles, an American author associated with New Thought, addressed readers across a national mail-order market that made inexpensive success manuals widely available. The setting includes expanding public libraries, magazines, and correspondence courses, institutions that carried self-improvement literature into small towns and cities alike.
The New Thought movement arose in the late nineteenth century from "mind-cure" traditions associated with figures such as Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and the mental science teachers who followed, including Emma Curtis Hopkins. It developed distinct institutions—magazines, correspondence schools, and publishing houses—separate from but often compared with Christian Science. Its literature emphasized practical spirituality, affirmation, and the formative power of thought on character and circumstance. Wattles participated in this milieu as a contributor to The Nautilus, a leading monthly edited by Elizabeth Towne in Holyoke. His 1910 volume belongs to a stream of concise, method-driven manuals promising results in everyday life.
American society in 1900–1910 faced concentrated corporate power, urban crowding, and labor conflict, prompting Progressive reforms in antitrust, public health, and education. Simultaneously, a vibrant self-help culture encouraged personal initiative as a route to advancement. Wattles navigated both currents. Residing in the Midwest and active in Indiana, he affiliated with the Socialist Party and ran for public office in the early twentieth century, advocating economic and civic reforms. That engagement placed his self-culture writing within debates over individual effort versus structural change. The Science of Being Great addresses personal development while remaining legible to readers conversant with reform-era ideals.
At the turn of the century, success literature flourished alongside reform journalism. Orison Swett Marden’s books and Success magazine popularized disciplined habits and optimism; Russell H. Conwell’s "Acres of Diamonds" lecture toured widely. New Thought publishers tapped the same audience through practical handbooks and serialized lessons. Elizabeth Towne’s house specialized in brief, plainly written guides, and Wattles’s titles appeared in that format. Cheap printing, postal delivery, and subscription networks enabled national reach. Readers encountered strategies for character, work, and enterprise that promised measurable outcomes, a tone The Science of Being Great shares while grounding achievement in mental and moral training.
Intellectually, the period valorized method and results. William James’s pragmatism framed truth in terms of practical consequences, and popular psychology introduced concepts of habit, will, suggestion, and attention to general audiences. The efficiency movement, soon codified in scientific management, urged systematic approaches to work. Against this backdrop, many writers labeled their systems "scientific" to signal reliability. Wattles’s title reflects that convention: he presents greatness as a teachable discipline governed by discoverable laws, not a matter of birth or chance. The book’s rational vocabulary aligned metaphysical self-culture with the era’s respect for experiment, training, and reproducible technique.
Religiously, early twentieth-century America saw liberal Protestantism and the Social Gospel emphasize moral action and human betterment, while metaphysical movements explored healing and mind-power. New Thought positioned itself as practical religion, often interpreting scripture metaphysically and welcoming adherents across denominations. Wattles adopted a broadly Christian vocabulary familiar to his readership, presenting greatness in ethical terms and referencing exemplary lives as models of conduct without arguing sectarian doctrine. The book thus fit churchgoing culture yet remained non-dogmatic, appealing to readers who sought personal transformation consistent with progressive morality and compatible with contemporary interest in health, psychology, and everyday success.
Wattles wrote from the American Midwest, with much of his adult life spent in Indiana, while his books moved through New England publishing channels to reach national readers. Elizabeth Towne’s press and The Nautilus provided editing, promotion, and mail-order fulfillment from Holyoke, Massachusetts. Beyond formal schools, adult education thrived via lyceum and Chautauqua circuits, public libraries, and workplace study clubs, creating communities primed for concise manuals. The Science of Being Great circulated in this ecosystem, suitable for private study and for group discussion, and its compact chapters matched the habits of readers balancing wage work, civic engagement, and ongoing self-education.
The Science of Being Great mirrors its moment by uniting Progressive confidence in improvement with New Thought’s conviction that disciplined thinking shapes conduct and destiny. Its language democratizes "greatness," challenging inherited hierarchies by proposing methodical cultivation rather than pedigree or privilege. The book’s stress on integrity, purposeful action, and sustained attention accords with contemporary psychology and the ethos of efficiency, yet its humane tone resonates with reformist concerns for character and service. In this way, Wattles’s manual both reflects early twentieth-century American optimism and offers a quiet critique of fatalism and class exclusivity, urging readers toward self-mastery tied to civic betterment.
Wallace D. Wattles: The Science of Being Great
Any Person May Become Great
THERE is a Principle of Power in every person[1q]. By the intelligent use and direction of this principle, man can develop his own mental faculties. Man has an inherent power by which he may grow in whatsoever direction he pleases, and there does not appear to be any limit to the possibilities of his growth. No man has yet become so great in any faculty but that it is possible for someone else to become greater. The possibility is in the Original Substance from which man is made. Genius is Omniscience flowing into man.
Genius is more than talent. Talent may merely be one faculty developed out of proportion to other faculties, but genius is the union of man and God in the acts of the soul. Great men are always greater than their deeds. They are in connection with a reserve of power that is without limit. We do not know where the boundary of the mental powers of man is; we do not even know that there is a boundary.
The power of conscious growth is not given to the lower animals; it is mans alone and may be developed and increased by him. The lower animals can, to a great extent, be trained and developed by man; but man can train and develop himself. He alone has this power, and he has it to an apparently unlimited extent.
The purpose of life for man is growth, just as the purpose of life for trees and plants is growth. Trees and plants grow automatically and along fixed lines; man can grow, as he will. Trees and plants can only develop certain possibilities and characteristics; man can develop any power, which is or has been shown by any person, anywhere. Nothing that is possible in spirit is impossible in flesh and blood. Nothing that man can think is impossible-in action. Nothing that man can imagine is impossible of realization.
Man is formed for growth, and he is under the necessity of growing.
It is essential to his happiness that he should continuously advance.
Life without progress becomes unendurable, and the person who ceases from growth must either become imbecile or insane. The greater and more harmonious and well rounded his growth, the happier man will be.
