The Science of Getting Rich

Wallace D. Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich as a practical manual, not a work of philosophy, though it rests on a specific metaphysical claim. He held that a formless, thinking substance underlies all matter, and that a person's definite, faith filled thought impresses that substance and causes it to take the form the thinker pictures, a mechanism he called the Certain Way. Wattles presented the claim not as speculation but as something he had tested and applied to his own finances before writing the book, and he directed readers to a specific practice: hold a clear mental picture of what is wanted, act with gratitude as though it were already granted, and take every action available today rather than waiting for ideal conditions.

The book explicitly set itself apart from the charity and renunciation strand of Christian teaching about wealth, arguing instead that poverty served no one and that becoming rich by the Certain Way was itself an act in harmony with universal increase rather than competition against other people for a fixed supply. Wattles had studied Hegel and Emerson before arriving at his own synthesis, and the book's seventeen short chapters read as a condensed, applied version of New Thought's core premise, that mind is causally primary over matter, aimed narrowly at one outcome: money.

The Science of Getting Rich sold modestly on its 1910 release from the Elizabeth Towne Company, a publisher specializing in New Thought and mind cure literature, and Wattles himself died the following year, in 1911, having written several shorter companion works along the same lines. The book stayed in print within New Thought circles across the twentieth century without ever becoming a mainstream bestseller in its own right.

Its wider fame arrived nearly a century later. Rhonda Byrne has said in interviews that reading The Science of Getting Rich, discovered through her daughter, was the direct spark for The Secret, the 2006 book and companion film that popularized the law of attraction to a mass audience and became one of the best selling self help works of the twenty first century. Byrne credited Wattles by name in promotional interviews around The Secret's release, and the earlier book's public domain status, its American copyright had lapsed decades before, meant it circulated freely online through the same surge of interest, introducing Wattles' original prose to readers who had come to the idea through Byrne's newer, more commercially packaged version rather than the reverse.