Robert Collier

(1885-1950)

Robert Collier’s The Secret of the Ages has changed thousands of lives for the better. Written originally as “a set of books,” he condensed the original seven volumes into one book, and it has been a best seller for many, many years. It has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Spanish, and sold all over the world. He also wrote four more courses, which he sold separately as, The God in You, The Secret Power, The Magic Word, and The Law of the Higher Potential. He later combined this excellent material into one book and named it, The Law of the Higher Potential. It has since been renamed, "Riches Within Your Reach." Thousands of lives have been healed physically, financially and emotionally by the study of Robert Collier’s inspirational works.

Robert "Bob" Collier was born April 19, 1885, in St. Louis, to Mary and John Collier. His father was a foreign correspondent for “Collier’s Magazine” (founded and published by his uncle Peter F. Collier). Robert was educated in seminary, but before taking his vows, he decided against life as a priest and headed for West Virginia to seek his fortune.

He spent eight years in West Virginia as a mining engineer, all the while studying and reading every book available in the mining company’s office on business and advertising. At the end of the eight years he moved to New York City and worked for the P.F. Collier Publishing Company where he became successful in the world of advertising

After being cured in Christian Science of an undiagnosable and lingering illness, he began to delve into the power of the Mind to heal. He reasoned that if the Mind could heal the body, why not the pocketbook and life in general. He further reasoned that if the Mind alone could heal an illness so quickly, one that the doctor’s for months had failed to cure, why would it not be possible to apply the same rules or laws to every aspect of individual life. If it could bring good health, why not abundance in every other aspect of our lives. He began to study everything he could find on mental healing, transcendentalism, new thought, all of the nineteenth and twentieth century masters. In finding the answers he not only found his own health, but by writing as he did, he helped thousands of others achieve health, wealth and happiness.

The Law of Attraction  was written about at length in Robert Collier’s works. We quote as follows from his wonderful book The Law of the Higher Potential some of his thoughts on the Law of Attraction:

"No matter how limited your education, no matter how straitened your circumstances, the God in you HAS the knowledge and the means and the power to accomplish any right thing you may desire. Give him a job—and it is DONE! You HAVE it! And you have only to see that finished result in your mind’s eye –“BELIEVE THAT YOU RECEIVE”—in order to begin to reflect it on the material plane.

Therein lies the nucleus of every success—the nucleus which has such life that it draws to itself everything it needs for its full expression—the belief that you HAVE.

It is the secret of power, the Talisman of Napoleon. To acquire it takes just three things:

1. Know that this is a world of Intelligence. Nothing merely happens. You were put here for a purpose, and you were given every qualification and every means necessary to the accomplishment of that purpose. So you need never fear whether you are big enough, or smart enough, or rich enough to do the things required of you. “The Father knoweth that ye have need of these things,” so do the things that are given you to do in the serene knowledge that your needs will be met.

2. Know that The God in You which is your REAL Self is already DOING this work you were given to do, so all that is required of you is to SEE that accomplished result, and reflect it step by step on the material plane, as the way is opened to you. “And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying—“This is the way. Walk ye in it.”

3. Have serene faith in your God’s ability to express the finished results through you. When you can SEE that result in your mind’s eye as already accomplished, you will realize that you don’t need to fear or worry or rush in and do things foolishly. You can go serenely ahead and do the things that are indicated for you to do. When you seem to reach a cul-de-sac, you can wait patiently, leaving the problem to The God in You in the confident knowledge that at the right time and in the right way he will give you a “lead” showing what you are to do.

The fundamental Law of the Universe, you remember is THE LAW OF ATTRACTION. You attract to you whatever you truly love and bless and believe is YOURS."

Robert Collier Publications, Inc. still exists, carried on first by his widow, and then by his children and grandchildren.

Robert Collier passed from this plane of existence in 1950, but his wonderful work endures, and shall endure because it is a work for the ages.

René Descartes

(1596 – 1650)

He was born in France. When he was one year old, his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died of tuberculosis. His father, Joachim, was a judge in the High Court of Justice. He followed his father’s wishes in his education and earned the right to practice law, but never followed through with that line. Instead, after his schooling was finished he went to the Netherlands.  Later in his Discourse on the Method, he explained: "I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it."

From the time of the last emperor of the Roman Empire, Theodosius (347 – 395) (remembered for making Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire) to the time of Descartes -- few dared venture out into the field of philosophy with any lasting success or continued life.

Descartes became known in history as "The Founder of Modern Philosophy" as well as "The Father of Modern Mathematics." His philosophy has been studied from his time down to the present day, and as the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system, Descartes founded analytic geometry, a bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus. His reflections on mind and mechanism were the beginning of the strain of western thought that eventually led to the invention of the electronic computer.

He was one of the key figures in “The Scientific Revolution” who said:
“Je pense, donc je suis,” or as we philosophiles so love to say: “I think, therefore I am.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Born May 25, 1803, at Boston, Massachusetts and died on April 27, 1882, at Concord, Massachusetts.

His life as poet, essayist, lecturer, and founder of the Transcendentalist Movement in America is so filled with the joy of living, and the grief of loss, that it will not be possible to give proper credit here to such a mind. We will simply highlight his life, and ask that the reader seek through the volumes he wrote and the volumes written about him in order to achieve some understanding of the greatness of his mind.

His father, a Unitarian minister who had called his son “a rather dull scholar,” died when Emerson was only eight years old, and his mother struggled to raise five boys — including a mentally retarded son — alone. With the aid of several grants, however, Emerson was able to enter Harvard College when he was fourteen. He was appointed Freshman’s President, a position that gave him a room in which to live free of charge, and he waited tables which reduced his board to one quarter. He worked as a tutor, a messenger in order to help pay other expenses and he received a scholarship. To complement his meager salary, he tutored and taught during the winter vacation at his Uncle Ripley's school in Waltham, Massachusetts.

After Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821 at the age of eighteen, he assisted his brother in teaching at a school established in their mother's house.

Over the next several years, Emerson made his living as a schoolmaster, then went to Harvard Divinity School and emerged as a Unitarian minister in 1829. His brief career as a minister was marred by religious doubt and by his wife's death. His first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, died of tuberculosis at age 19 on February 8, 1831.

Because he felt that he could no longer perform certain church rituals in good faith, he resigned his ministry in 1832.

Emerson toured Europe and the Middle East in 1832 and during this trip he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Talor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. Emerson maintained contact with Carlyle until the latter's death in 1881 and he served as Carlyle's agent in the U.S. After traveling through Europe for a year, Emerson returned to the United States to devote himself to lecturing and writing.

Emerson bought a house in 1835 on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike in Massachusetts that is now open to the public as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House. He quickly became one of the leading citizens in the town, and married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, there. He called her Lydian and she called him Mr. Emerson. Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith and Edward Waldo Emerson. Ellen was named for his first wife, at Lydian’s suggestion. From 1836 through 1838 he served as Minister to the small Unitarian congregation in East Lexington Massachusetts, Follen Church Society. This was his last ministerial position.

In September 1835, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club which served as a center for the movement. Emerson anonymously published his first essay Nature in September of 1836, but did not publish the Transcendental Club’s journal The Dial until July of 1840.

Early in 1842, Emerson lost his first son, Waldo, to scarlet fever. Emerson wrote about his grief in two major works: the poem "Threnody," and the essay "Experience." In the same year, William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his godfather.

In 1845, Emerson's Journal records that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s Essays on the Vedas. Emerson was strongly influenced by the Vedas and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism.

One of the clearest examples of this can be found in part in his essay, "The Over-soul:"
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Yet he had his light side also, saying "Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."

Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

In May 2006, 168 years after Emerson delivered his "Divinity School Address," Harvard Divinity School announced the establishment of the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Professorship. The Emerson Chair is expected to be occupied in the fall of 2007 or soon thereafter.

1802 -1866
Father of New Thought

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, born in Lebanon, New Hampshire on February 16, 1802, was the sixth of the seven children of Jonathan and Susanna Quimby. Jonathan Quimby, a blacksmith, moved his family to Belfast, Maine when Phineas was two years old. The blacksmith shop was across the road from the family home, and both home and shop were located on top of Quimby Hill with a lovely view of Belfast Bay.

Because there was little available formal schooling in that area, Phineas was largely self-taught, however he had an extraordinary mind and exceptional reasoning ability. He retained easily all that he read and studied. As a youth, with his older brother, William, he apprenticed with the first clockmaker in Belfast, Abel Eastman. The brothers later took over the business themselves, and gained renown as a clockmakers.

The following three paragraphs are quoted from the present day website of the Belfast Historical Society and Museum:
(http://www.ppquimby.com/ron/brochure.htm )

An original P. P. Quimby clock is a rare and highly desirable treasure.

In 1836, Quimby teamed up with another clockmaker, Timothy Chase, and together they designed, built, and installed the tower clock in the First Church of Belfast on October 3rd of that year. The iron-work for the clock mechanism was made in a machine shop at the Head of The Tide in Belfast. This clock is the fourth oldest tower clock in the State of Maine and the oldest tower clock built by Maine clockmakers. As of this writing in 2004, 168 years later, the Quimby & Chase tower clock is still marking the passage of time atop the FirstChurch.

During his lifetime, Quimby obtained four letters of patent on his inventions. President Andrew Jackson personally signed two of those patents. Professionally, he was a clockmaker, a jeweler, a daguerreo-typist, merchant, philosopher, mesmerist, and finally, a Healing Physician.
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It is about his life as a “Healing Physician” that we wish to speak here. He was the discoverer and originator of truths set forth and used by many modern day religious organizations and churches, such as Christian Science, Unity, Divine Science, Science of Mind, and Eschatology, as well as those philosophical ideas propounded in the “The Secret,” a recent phenomenon in the video and book world.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby is recognized by many scholars as the founder and father of the “new thought” in America. It is our belief that even though others may claim the title of “originator of the truth” it appears to this writer after exhaustive research, that to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby go the honors for having uncovered and rediscovered what was for centuries lost, and that is -- that our lives are what we believe them to be; that all health, wealth and happiness comes from our thoughts and feelings; and that we have control over our lives simply by what we believe to be true.

He believed that what Jesus of Nazareth taught was absolute truth that was lost for centuries by being swallowed up by the politics of organized religion. He unfolded this truth slowly but toward the end of his life on this plane of existence he had unfolded a preponderance of the truth that had been lost for so long a time.

Dr. Quimby claimed that all mental and most physical diseases were the result of faulty reasoning. He said "the explanation is the cure." He treated over 12,000 people in the last 8 years of his life, using his own unique process which he termed "The Quimby System." He also found that many religious beliefs and opinions were the root cause of a great percentage of all the diseases he treated. Quimby claimed that disease is not the cause of illness, but is the effect of a conflict existing within the mind.

His philosophy is set forth in his own words as follows:

MY THEORY: The trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in. . .If your mind has been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge. By my theory of truth I come in contact with your enemy and restore you to health and happiness. – Volume 3, page 208 of Quimby’s Complete Writings

Some today whose philosophy was founded upon the truths taught by Dr. Quimby deny that he had anything to do with what they teach. However, most churches such as Science of Mind, Unity and others give credit where credit is due.

While searching the web one of the most straight-forward, succinct, and loving affirmations of Dr.Quimby’s life and work was discovered by this writer at http://www.secaucus.org/quimby.html the website of The Quimby Community Church of Secaucus, New Jersey, and is copied here from that site as follows:

Who is Quimby?

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866) was a nineteenth century mystic, healer, humanitarian, scientist who initiated a contemporary philosophy and called it, "The Science of Health and Happiness." His insight into the relationship between beliefs held in mind and the experience were well in advance of his time.

Quimby is known as the father of New Thought, practical metaphysics and practical Christianity. His work laid the foundation for such movements as Divine Science, Christian Science, Unity, Religious Science and many more. He believed disease is an error in the mind and could be corrected by the understanding of the right relation between the divine and the human.

Quimby's philosophy covered certain ideas which enrich life in all ways.

Beliefs determine happiness or the lack of it.
Beliefs can be changed.
Life responds to our beliefs.
We exist within the One Presence, the One Spirit.
We have access to the One
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We wish to end this short biography of a great man by printing here the last three paragraphs from an article written in The New England Magazine in 1888 by Dr Quimby’s son, George A. Quimby that will be found in a longer transcript of that writing at http://www.answers.com/topic/phineas-quimby
An hour before he breathed his last, he said to the writer: "I am more than ever convinced of the truth of my theory. I am perfectly willing for the change myself, but I know you all will feel badly, and think I am dead; but I know that I shall be right here with you, just as I always have been. I do not dread the change any more than if I were going on a trip to Philadelphia."

His death occurred January 16, 1866, at his residence in Belfast, at the age of sixty-four years, and was the result of too close application to his profession and of overwork.
A more fitting epitaph could not be accorded him than in these words: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." For if ever a man did lay down his life for others, that man was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.

~ George Albert Quimby (son) written in 1888 ~
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It is hoped that the resurgence of worldwide interest in “New Thought” (as brought about by the phenomenon of the recent movie “The Secret”) will bring many into touch with the history of this kind, loving man who dedicated his life to helping others.