As a Man Thinketh, by Allen

Monday July 13, 2026

As a Man Thinketh is a 1903 self-help "book" (you can print it on eleven sheets of paper) that was part of what William James called "the mind-cure movement." It's an ancestor of The Secret.

"The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fears; ..."

Why do these books on literally magical thinking get anything other than laughs? They encourage a false belief which can be maladaptive, but which may also have benefits.

The immediate psychological benefit to a believer is a sense of control. While a stoic says you can only control your thoughts, Allen says that you can control everything by controlling your thoughts. People like feeling like they're in control.

Positive thinking can also connect to positive behaviors, either explicitly or incidentally.

"Men are anxious to improve their circumstances [wealth], but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound."

This kind of "work on yourself" advice is generally good. Part of the problem is that people may not know how to achieve their goals. This is related to Why greatness cannot be planned.

Often one doesn't even know what the goal is exactly. If you want wealth, for example, you might get it somehow, but you can't really pursue it directly. You can pursue behaviors, opportunities, virtues... things that you hope to move you in the right direction.

"A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances."

Positive thinking can help you to identify opportunities as such, to feel empowered to go for it when they present themselves, to have the confidence to try things, and through mechanisms like this lead to actual achievement.

The law of attraction can also encourage useful interpretations of events even if nothing is objectively changed.

"... the Great Law which is absolutely just, and which cannot give good for evil, evil for good."

If you believe everything is caused by you, then if something good happens you take credit for it and feel good. If something bad happens you take it as feedback and look for something in yourself that you can improve.

Of course if you take this as an absolute it's deeply mean.

"The sole and supreme use of suffering is to purify, to burn out all that is useless and impure. Suffering ceases for him who is pure."

Allen even blames the victim in cases of health.

"Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought."

This supports a typically conservative American idea of individual responsibility.

"In a justly ordered universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute."

In addition to being cruel, the law of attraction can be deeply maladaptive if one doesn't connect thought to action but relies on pure thought to achieve success, sitting motionless with nothing but a sense of entitlement and possibly solipsism.

One more quote:

"As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking."

This one I found interesting, probably not quite in the way Allen intended it, but in the pure sense of exercising the mind to improve cognition, memory, knowledge, that kind of thing. It really does seem very different... There is indeed a ton of knowledge about how to strengthen your body. If you want to strengthen a muscle, there are exercises you can do and you'll get stronger. There's knowledge about how to eat to support that, how to sleep to strengthen that. Of course it's also much easier to measure how strong a muscle is, to see results. But is there a good analog for the mind? I used to do Lumosity "brain training" but I think at some point they were sued for false claims and lost... Education has a million specialties but doesn't feel really analogous... I'm not totally sure where I'm going with this, but it felt like an interesting germ of a thought to chew on...