As a Man Thinketh

As a Man Thinketh

In the winter of 1879, a fifteen-year-old boy in Leicester, England received news that his father was dead. William Allen had traveled alone to New York to find work after the textile trade collapsed. Within two days of landing he was found at a city hospital, robbed and killed. James Allen -- the eldest son -- left school the next morning and found a factory job. The family needed money. The family needed him to stop being a child.

He would spend the next twenty-three years in offices and factories, working as a knitter's assistant, then a manufacturer's secretary, then a private secretary to businessmen who gave orders and never once asked about the books he was reading on lunch breaks. He read everything: the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist scripture, Tolstoy, Emerson, the Bible. He read with the focused desperation of someone who suspects that the way out of a life is through a different set of ideas about what a life is for.

What Allen was looking for, across all that reading, was a principle of causation that he could trust. Not fate. Not class. Not the accident of birth or the violence that had taken his father. He wanted a principle that placed the determinative factor inside the person rather than outside. The Eastern texts gave him karma -- the moral law of action and consequence. Emerson gave him the over-soul, the correspondence between inner and outer. Tolstoy gave him the example of a man who had rejected wealth and status in favor of something harder to name: integrity with his own convictions. Allen synthesized all of this into a position that was functionally his own: the mind is the prime mover, and everything else follows from it.