The Science of Getting Rich: Complete and Original Signature Edition

By Wallace D. Wattles and Mitch Horowitz

“FORMLESS INTELLIGENCE” STANDSREADY TO CARRY OUT YOUR WISHES
With this key principle, success pioneer Wallace D. Wattles (1860-1911) introduced the world to The Science of Getting Rich.

This edition of Wattles’ classic faithfully reproduces the author’s complete text as originally published in 1910. A new introduction by popular voice of esoteric ideas Mitch Horowitz contextualizes the historical background of the author and his pioneering publisher Elizabeth Towne.

Mitch’s Afternotes following each chapter amplify Wattles’ methods and provide powerful exercises and insights, including how to remove hidden blocks; experiments in “retrocausality;” receiving results through “established channels;” getting in touch with your most authentic desires, and ways to maintain a consistent mindset.

Wattles’ classic text teaches you:

• How ideas shape the physical world.
• Why creativity matters more than competition.
• Why one passionately felt aim is the foundation of all achievement.
• How your mental powers and practical abilities work together.
• How to think in a “Certain Way” to guarantee success.
• How the formless creative matter of life is acted on by your intelligence.

“The law of the Increase of Life,” Wattles writes, “is as mathematically certain in its operation as the law of gravitation; getting rich is an exact science.” In his brief yet seismically powerful volume, Wattles distills his insights—with the added benefits of the historical background and exercises found in this Maple Spring edition.

If you are new to The Science of Getting Rich or if you’re revisiting it for a refresher, here is the signature volume to experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maple Spring Publishing
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350500226

Wallace D. Wattles

Wallace Delois Wattles (1860-1911) was the author of numerous books, the best known of which is The Science of Getting Rich. He experienced failure after failure in his early life until after many years of study and experimentation he formulated a set of principles that, with scientific precision, create financial and spiritual wealth. He died a prosperous man in 1911.

Book preview

Introduction

The Green Doorknob

By Mitch Horowitz

I want to open this Maple Spring edition of The Science of Getting Rich on a very personal note. The day I began preparing my introduction and annotations to this volume, I randomly came across notes I had made about an intriguing dream from December 23, 2017. I rarely write down my dreams and I had long forgotten this one. The fact that I recorded it spoke to how deeply the dream struck me then—as its unexpected recollection does now.

In the dream, I encountered a deceased and beloved spiritual teacher of mine: a powerful, temperamental man with a razor-sharp intellect. He assigned me a certain task, which seemed easy enough. What follows are my notes exactly as I wrote them:

But then he gave me another, more difficult task involving painting a DOORKNOB GREEN. Stores with supplies were spotted but were closing, one then another. It would be difficult. I took this to mean perseverance in my aim, and green being money.

The truth is: almost no vocation in life proves satisfying unless it is healthfully remunerative. We qualify and flee from that truth, but it catches up with us. Wallace D. Wattles affirms this tough verity over and over in these pages. If you’re like me, you probably require little convincing. Although life invariably places many demands on us, the attainment of money is a constant.

Unless you were born affluent, money is likely on your mind every day. Wattles, a man of deep ethical passion and broad-ranging social and spiritual vision, dedicated his book to attainment—and provided metaphysical keys that had worked for him. In presenting his keys, Wattles offered a complete philosophy of life.

There is a conflict today in New Thought, or positive-mind, culture. Some seekers want a New Thought that emphasizes personal advancement and ambition. Others believe that New Thought should focus on some conception of social justice—they consider emphasizing money as gauche, unspiritual, or selfish. Wattles’ 1910 classic points the way out of this conflict. The author demonstrates how these two priorities are actually one and the same.

A Quaker, social reformer, and early theorist of positive-mind metaphysics, the Indiana seeker believed that the true aim of enrichment is not accumulation of personal resources alone but establishment of a more equitable world of common abundance and possibility. Wattles felt that combining mind-power mechanics with dedication to self-improvement and creativity above sharp-elbowed competition, makes you part of an interlinking chain that leads to a more thriving culture.

His slender guidebook The Science of Getting Rich remained obscure among mainstream readers until about 2007. At that time, word spread that The Science of Getting Rich was a source behind Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. The Science of Getting Rich began to hit bestseller lists nearly a century after the author’s death in 1911. I published a paperback edition that reached number-one on the Bloomberg Businessweek bestseller list. My audio condensation later hit number-two on iTunes.

What many of Wattles’ new fans missed, however, was his dedication to the ethic of cooperative advancement and his belief that competition itself is an outmoded idea, soon to be supplanted by the causative faculties of the mind. Once unlocked, he taught, these greater abilities will grant working people the secrets to a life of affluence for themselves and others.

Wattles was born in 1860 on an Illinois family farm, where he was still laboring at age 19 in the rural Nunda Township. By the time he emerged as a New Thought leader, the seeker had already been forced to resign from his Methodist pulpit in North Judson, Indiana, in 1900. He had gone too far in his social radicalism, at one point insisting that churches should refuse monetary offerings from businessmen who profited off sweatshop labor. Soon after, he announced his departure from Methodism and grew active in the more liberal environs of Quakerism.

Wattles gained allies in mind-power circles—particularly his trailblazing publisher Elizabeth Towne (1865–1960), a Massachusetts suffragette who ran his work in her New Thought journal Nautilus. Towne began the magazine in 1898 as a single mother with two children to support. Her marriage—which began when she dropped out of school at age 14—finally ended in divorce in 1900. Relying on temporary financial backing from her father of $30 a month for six months, Towne built Nautilus into a relative powerhouse of up to 90,000 monthly subscribers with some of her own books surpassing sales of 100,000 copies. Towne ran the journal until age 88 in 1953, making it one of the longest-running spiritual magazines in American history. Her career played out in the political arena, as well. In 1926, Towne was elected the first female alderman in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Two years later she mounted an unsuccessful independent bid for mayor. Towne and her second husband, William, were also active in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Progressive Party campaign for president.

Wattles himself made three upstart bids for public office, each time on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America of Eugene V. Debs, to whom he pays tribute in his 1911 book The Science of Being Great. In Indiana, Wattles first campaigned for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District in 1908. After distantly trailing, he ran the following year for mayor of his hometown of Elwood, where he ran a surprisingly close second. Finally, in 1910 he ran for Prosecuting Attorney for Madison County, Indiana, coming in third. During his 1909 mayoral campaign, the delicate-framed man stood before 1,300 striking workers during a heated showdown at a local tin mill and pledged them his support.

Rather than a narrowly conceived iteration of the prosperity gospel, The Science of Getting Rich is, in fact, a guidebook to personal utopia, where state and corporate dinosaurs are predicted to wither away, replaced by a cooperative system of personal wealth and beneficent anarchy. By thinking in a Certain Way, the author taught, you can at once personally succeed and overthrow the old social order. Wattles wrote:

You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now.

I am aware that there are men who get a vast amount of money by proceeding in direct opposition to the statements in the paragraph above, and may add a word of explanation here. Men of the plutocratic type, who become very rich, do so sometimes purely by their extraordinary ability on the plane of competition.… Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, et al., have been the unconscious agents of the Supreme in the necessary work of systematizing and organizing productive industry; and in the end, their work will contribute immensely toward increased life for all. Their day is nearly over; they have organized production, and will soon be succeeded by the agents of the multitude, who will organize the machinery of distribution.

If Wattles’ more careful readers detected a tinge of socialist language, they were right. The author saw New Thought as a means to the kind of leisurely socialist utopia that had enthralled legions of readers of Edward Bellamy’s Victorian-era futuristic novel, Looking Backward. Within Wattles there existed a struggle to unite two mighty currents that were sweeping early twentieth century America: social radicalism and mind-power mysticism.

Was Wattles’ century-old vision of New Thought and social reform really so utopian? We live in an age of remarkable new discoveries of the mind’s power: physicians have performed successful placebo surgeries and demonstrated the placebo response in weight loss as well as in instances where placebos are transparently administered; in the field called neuroplasticity, brain scans reveal that the brain’s neural pathways are actually rewired by thought patterns—a biological act of mind over matter; quantum physics experiments pose extraordinary questions about causality between thought and object, with implications extending to the perceptual basis of reality itself; and academic ESP research repeatedly demonstrates the nonphysical conveyance of data across boundaries of time, space, and mass in laboratory settings. Wattles’ mission was to ask whether these extraordinary possibilities, which were only hinted at in the science of his day, can be applied and experimented with on the material and social scales of life.

Wattles did not live long enough to see his book’s influence. Less than a year after it appeared, he died of tuberculosis in 1911 at age fifty while traveling to Ruskin, Tennessee, which had been home to the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a socialist commune from 1894 to 1901. But Wattles’ calm certainty and confident yet gentle tone as a writer suggest that he understood the portent of what he was conveying. In addition to his numerous books and articles on mind metaphysics, Wattles left behind a sole novel published in 1910, Hell-Fire Harrison, about the adventures of an independent-minded American tobacco farmer and congressman in late-eighteenth century England.

Like every great thinker, Wattles left us not with a doctrine but rather with articles of experimentation. The finest thing you can do to honor the memory of this good man—and to advance your own place in life—is to heed his advice: experiment with the capacities of your mind. Try. And if you experience results, as I think you will, do what he did: share what you found.

This volume of The Science of Getting Rich is reproduced from one of the earliest extant editions published by Elizabeth Towne on April 1, 1910, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. It includes all of the author’s original passages and word choices, capitalizations and italics. Hence, you are encountering a definitive edition as Wattles originally produced it. My Afternotes, which include exercises and ideas to work with, follow each chapter, with the exception of the preface and summary.

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian whose books include Occult America, One Simple Idea, The Miracle Club, Daydream Believer, Uncertain Places, and Modern Occultism.

   Preface   

This book is pragmatical, not philosophical; a practical manual, not a treatise upon theories. It is intended for the men and women whose most pressing need is for money; who wish to