Wallace Wattles and the Thinking Stuff: The 1910 Book Behind Modern Manifestation

Long before The Secret, before vision boards, before the phrase Law of Attraction became a hashtag, there was a slim 1910 book called The Science of Getting Rich. Its author, Wallace Wattles, described something he called the thinking stuff — a substance behind everything in the world, shaped by thought. Every modern manifestation book since traces back, directly or indirectly, to this one idea.

Wattles was not wrong. He was also not complete. Understanding what he got right — and what he never had — explains a hundred years of manifestation books that all describe the same substance and none of them tell you how to build it.

Who was Wallace Wattles, and what did he actually claim?

Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, decades before positive thinking became a mass-market industry. His central claim: there is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and this stuff, in its original state, permeates and fills the universe. A person’s thought, pressed into this substance, can produce the thing that thought imagines.

It reads today as a very early, very direct version of the same idea The Secret sold to tens of millions of people a century later. Wattles was simply first to put it into a widely read book.

What Wattles got right

Give Wattles his due: he was describing something real. A substance behind the visible world that responds to a focused mind is not a fantasy he invented — it is an observation that shows up across very different traditions and eras, described in different vocabularies by different serious writers. Wattles was an honest reporter of something he had genuinely touched.

His book still gets read and recommended today, more than a century after publication, precisely because it named something true. That staying power is not an accident.

What “thinking stuff” left out

Here is the limit of the book, stated plainly rather than dismissively: Wattles could describe the thinking stuff. He could tell you to think in a certain way, hold a mental picture, act as though the outcome were already yours. What he could not do — what nobody in his tradition could do — was teach you to build the substance inside yourself.

The instructions in The Science of Getting Rich are entirely about the mind: think, believe, picture, act. There is no practice in the book for cultivating the underlying energy that would give that thinking real force. That absence is not a personal failing of Wattles. It is a gap in the entire Western tradition he was writing from.

The same substance, an older name

What Wattles called thinking stuff, the Chinese tradition named thousands of years before he wrote a word. The old texts describe a primordial, unified qi — born before heaven and earth, one qi formed in unity. Different vocabulary, same underlying observation: something real behind the visible world, responsive to a person’s inner state.

The difference is not the naming. The difference is that the Chinese tradition, alongside the naming, built an actual practice for cultivating that substance in a person’s own body. That practice is qigong. Wattles named it and stopped there. Qigong named it and then spent thousands of years developing a way to build it.

Why the book still circulates a century later

Part of why The Science of Getting Rich keeps finding new readers is that Wattles wrote with unusual clarity and confidence for a self-help book of its era. He was not hedging or speculating — he wrote as someone reporting what he had directly observed about how a focused, certain mind changes a person’s circumstances. That confidence is part of what later writers, including the authors of The Secret, borrowed from him almost a century later.

But confidence in the description is not the same as completeness in the method. Every later book in this lineage inherited the same gap Wattles left: a clear account of what to believe, with no account of how to build the capacity behind the belief. Readers who apply Wattles’s instructions exactly as written run into the identical ceiling readers of The Secret and Think and Grow Rich run into a century later — because it is the same missing half in every case.

Reading Wattles today

The Science of Getting Rich is worth reading for what it is: an honest, early description of something real, written by someone who could feel it but had no practice to hand you for building it. That is not a criticism of the book. It is simply where its usefulness ends.

If Wattles’s thinking stuff resonated with you, the next step is not a better affirmation or a more disciplined mental picture — it is the cultivation practice his tradition never had. The free Onenergy app offers guided daily qigong sessions for exactly that. Master Dai also teaches the fuller relationship between cultivated qi and directed intention in live Onenergy Way events.

Frequently asked questions

What is Wallace Wattles’s “thinking stuff”?

Thinking stuff is the term Wallace Wattles used in his 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich for a universal substance he believed everything is made from, shaped by focused thought. It is an early description of the same substance later manifestation writers named differently.

Is The Science of Getting Rich still relevant today?

Yes, as an honest early description of a real underlying substance. What it lacks, like every book in its tradition, is a practice for cultivating that substance — it only teaches the mental side, not the energetic building side.

Did Wallace Wattles have a practice for building the thinking stuff, or just a theory?

Just a theory and a set of mental instructions — think in a certain way, hold a picture, act as if it were already true. He had no practice for cultivating the substance itself, because that practice did not exist in the Western tradition he wrote from.

What is the equivalent of Wattles’s thinking stuff in an actual practice?

Qigong works with qi, a much older concept describing the same kind of underlying substance, and unlike Wattles’s tradition, it comes with thousands of years of practice for cultivating it. The free Onenergy app is a place to begin that practice.