and Carlyles who soundly rated the ethics of
selfishness and the political economies of competition and the politics
of self-assertion and who stirred deeply the more sensitive of their
time. And finally they were challenged, and here we begin to approach
again the genesis of New Thought, by a philosophic movement which found
its point of departure in certain great aspects of earlier thinking
which had been much obscured by the difficult forms in which it had been
stated: the supremacy, that is, of the soul over all its surroundings.

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