The Science of Mind by Ernest Shurtleff Holmes.pdf

You are holding a book that has influenced millions of people since it's original publication in 1926. The ideas within the book are as current now as they were when it was written and will remain current for generations to come. I first encountered it in a bookstore in Denver, Colorado, in the 1980s

-I saw a tall stack of thick hardcover books called The Science of Mind. Picking one of the copies up, I flipped through it, and saw it was filled with concepts, ideas, meditations, even charts, all explaining a school of thought that would later change my life. I soon discovered that The Science of Mind is a foundational text in a larger school of philosophy commonly called "New Thought."

Ernest Holmes is known as the founder of the Religious Science philosophy, which is largely represented now by the Centers for Spiritual Living (CSL). There are hundreds of CSL Centers around the United States, Canada, Mexico, and more and more around the world. 

Ernest Shurtleff Holmes was born in 1887 in Lincoln, Maine, and was born into a free-thinking family. At age 15, he moved to Boston where he read Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement. By all accounts, he had an extremely curious mind and read as many books as he could find, devouring the works of, among many 

others, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David

 Thoreau, as well as early New Thought pioneers, such as Warren Felt Evans, Phineas P. Quimby, William Walker Atkinson, Christian D. Larson, and Emma Curtis Hopkins.

Another early influence seemed to be John Bascom, a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century educator and philosopher, who briefly was the president of the University of Wisconsin. He wrote several dozen books with titles such as Natural Theology; Science, Philosophy and Religion; and An Historical Interpretation of Philosophy.

In 1881, Bascom published a book titled The Science of Mind, which reflected his on going adaptation of the ideas of the time with the concepts of religion, philosophy, psychology, and science. He called this philosophy

New Theology. You can easily find copies of Bascom's The Science of Mind online, and reading through it, you can see how much it influenced Holmes's thought, though Holmes later both simplified and expanded the ideas in Bascom's book.

Holmes eventually moved to California and began work in the city government. He ended up giving a lecture at Los Angeles's Metaphysical Library, which ended up being a success. He continued to give lectures, and his audiences grew quickly. He was known for his brilliant mind, his humor, and his enthusiastic oratory skills. He soon traveled around the country giving lectures on the New Thought principles that had become his passion.

In 1919, Holmes's first book, a slim volume titled Creative Mind, was published by Robert M. McBride & Company of New York. It contained a series of lectures that Holmes had given during the previous few years.

Shortly thereafter, Robert M. McBride & Company published another short book by Holmes, titled Creative Mind and Success, again based on the lectures he gave. Both of those books complete and original are included in this volume. It is remarkable to read these first books of Ernest Holmes alongside all the subsequent books he published before his death in 1960. So fully formed were the ideas that he shares in these two books, that the same ideas remained in the books throughout his life.