Now this return to what we may call the creative and controlling power of spiritual forces is the key to the modern approach to life. We do not understand, it may be, the meaning of our own terms. Spirit is a vague enough word but we do know that the initiative is with desire and purpose and understanding. These are positive and masterful; they are by no means free; they are conditioned by the vaster order of which they are a part, none the less our human world is plastic to their touch and our material world as well. Carlyle has chanted all this gustily enough but there is kindling truth in his stormy music. "Thus, like some wild flaming, wild thundering train of heaven's artillery does this mysterious mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas filled up in our passage. Can the earth which is but dead in a vision resist spirits which have reality and are alive?" _New England Transcendentalism. Quimby Again and the Dressers_ Curiously enough this quotation from a book which nowadays nobody likely reads save perhaps in some college course on early Victorian literature, brings us within sight of the beginnings of New Thought. A little group of English and American thinkers, part philosophers, part poets, part rebels against the established order, anticipated trained students in their return upon the higher and more positive side of an older philosophy. They made much of the inner life, its powers and its possibilities; they affirmed the creative power of the soul; they conceived life to lie plastic to the touch of vision and desire; they thought themselves to be standing upon the threshold of a new world. They were impatient of discipline; they dreamed impossible things and gave their dreams the authority of reality. They were hard enough to understand and they sorely tried practical plodding folk, but they kindled their time and released forces which are yet in action. New England, through a group of adventurous thinkers of whom Emerson was the most distinguished, responded strongly to Transcendentalism. Another group, as has been said, responded strongly to mesmerism and spiritism, which were also a part of the ferment of the time in which Christian Science and New Thought (I use New Thought here in the technical sense) find their source. And finally, Quimby, who is a rather unexpectedly important link in a long chain,--important, that is, to the student of modern cults--reacted against mesmerism, felt and thought his way toward some understanding of the force of suggestion in abnormal states, applied his conclusion to faith and mental healing and gathered about him--as has been said before--a little group of disciples who have between them released far-reaching movements.