‘As a Man Thinketh’: On the Power of Thinking Well

A review of ‘As a Man Thinketh’, by James Allen; 1903.

Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: —
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass.

So begins As a Man Thinketh, a self-help book published in 1903 by the British philosophical and spiritual writer James Allen. His book deals with the power and application of thought, which is to say in simpler terms: how the way in which we think informs the way in which we experience the world. It was not a new idea at the time of his writing: ‘You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will,’ declared the great Stoic sage and salve Epictetus. Milton put it yet more poetically, calling the mind ‘its own place, [which] in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’

Still, the best ideas are worth repeating; and what is interesting about Allen is that, like Epictetus (and unlike Milton) his beginnings were inauspicious. He was born into a working-class family in Leicester: his father was a factory knitter; his mother was illiterate. When the textile trade declined, his father went alone to America to find work and a new home for the family. Within two days he had been robbed and murdered. At 15, with the family facing financial ruin, Allen left school to work. He was a private secretary, then a journalist, then a full-time author and editor. From 1903 to his death in 1912, he published more than a book a year.

When the textile trade declined, his father went alone to America to find work and a new home for the family. Within two days he had been robbed and murdered.

This context matters. It matters because often those who share the secrets to their success have a convenient way of forgetting the happy accidents of their birth. In James Allen we have someone who worked doggedly from the bottom to, if not quite the top, then to such a position where he had a wife, child, home and influence doing something he liked. His wife would later say that Allen wrote ‘when he had a message’ and that it became a message ‘only when he had lived it out in his own life … He wrote facts, which he had proven by practice.’

Fittingly, then, this slim volume, which runs to scarcely more than 60 pages, is highly practical. The Bible verse which gives the book its title — ‘As a man thinketh, so is he’—is the spring from which Allen explores the impact of our thoughts on our character, health and life chances. He argues that our outer life is a close reflection of our inner life: if we think well, which is to say constructively, and in a manner aligned with virtues such as kindness, honesty, patience and responsibility, then our lives will be good. If, on the other hand, we harbour bad thoughts—resentment, say, or arrogance—our lives will be miserable. Over seven short chapters, each of which deals with a different aspect of this central idea, Allen considers more directly the effects of thoughts on health, for example, or circumstances.

The Bible verse which gives the book its title — ‘As a man thinketh, so is he’ — is the spring from which Allen explores the impact of our thoughts on our character, health and life chances.

His central theme, of course, is the power of thought; but one idea that sticks out is Allen’s notion that ‘thought is a seed’. This put me in mind of Thích Nhất Hạnh, who wrote somewhere that ‘Our mind is a field, in which every kind of seed is sown — seeds of compassion, joy, and hope, seeds of sorrow, fear, and difficulties.’ Whatever we plant in our mind, in other words, grows into the concrete reality of our life. We could also mention the Native American legend of the ‘Two Wolves’, framed as a conversation between a boy and his grandfather. The grandfather describes a battle between two wolves within ourselves, using this battle as a metaphor for inner conflict between darkness and despair on the one hand, and hope and joy on the other. When the listener asks which wolf wins, the grandfather answers ‘whichever one you feed’.

The charge often levelled at those who discuss the individual’s power of changing her own circumstances is that it makes that person responsible for circumstances over which they have little control and which could be changed if those in power were so inclined to change them. Hence why Friedrich Engels wrote about ‘social murder’, and why one Marxist podcast is entitled It’s Not All in Your Head. Summarising Marxism in an early debate with a group of Randian-style Objectivists (what is the collective noun for them, by the way?), Christopher Hitchens said that ‘If man is shaped by his environment, then that environment must be made human.’ And yet I do not think that there needs to be some neat and tidy resolution here. It is not an either/or. Yes, we are shaped by our environment. But we also have agency. It is paradoxical, but life is paradoxical. (‘Contradiction is the criterion of the real,’ wrote Simone Weil.) And in any event, it seems to me that if we were motivated to change our ‘conditions’, we would need some level of self-possession.

I think the difficulty with writing a book like this is that we can seem preachy, or forceful, pretentious or (on the other hand) shallow. Allen’s message is quite moral, since he presupposes that there are good ways to be and bad ways to be, and that the buck stops, as if it were, with the person herself. But he negotiates these choppy literary and intellectual waters deftly. His style is spare and direct but his tone is contemplative, rather than insistent. He writes with the authority of one who has lived out what he teaches. In point of fact his greatest accomplishment is convincing us of an idea that, for all its familiarity, runs against our instincts. Such is the strength of thought and feeling that it is difficult for us to remember that neither can be fully trusted as a guide to reality.

As a Man Thinketh is a classic for a reason, and it is much better, in my view, than almost all of the thousands of self-help and wellness books that appear every year and somehow manage to spread a 1,000-word sentiment across 300 or so pages. Its message is simple—we are, as William Henley puts it in ‘Invictus’, masters of our fate—and it is one that the author drives home. Of course, if you want your self-help dressed up in lovely colours, or punctuated with stories, or for each claim made to be supported by a raft psychological or neuroscientific studies, you will not find it here. But if you simply value the insight of someone who has clawed his way up from poverty to build a decent life for himself, and wishes to pass on what he has learned empirically along the way, then you will enjoy, and perhaps even feel unshackled and empowered, by As a Man Thinketh.