Prentice Mulford

Prentice Mulford is a historical teacher and recurring intellectual authority in The Secret, where his writings supply some of the clearest formulations of the book’s central claim that thought is not passive but causative. Although he is not a participant in the book’s contemporary testimonial world, his words bridge nineteenth-century New Thought and the modern teachers gathered around The Secret, giving the law of attraction an earlier lineage and a language of mental and spiritual practice.

Identity and Background

Prentice Mulford lived from 1834 to 1891 and is described as one of the earliest writers and founders of the New Thought movement. He was a recluse for much of his life, yet his influence extended far beyond his own biography: The Secret credits his work with influencing countless later writers and teachers. His subjects were mental and spiritual laws, and his titles included Thoughts Are Things and The White Cross Library, a collection of his essays.

His importance in The Secret is therefore both historical and functional. The book places him among the earlier voices through whom its doctrine was preserved and transmitted, alongside figures whose writings helped keep the teaching available across generations. The Secret’s acknowledgments specifically honor Prentice Mulford among the past “avatars and master teachers” whose writings lit a burning desire in its creator, while the book’s historical survey presents the law of attraction as a teaching expressed through many eras, religions, civilizations, and artistic traditions.

Thought as Force

Mulford’s most concentrated statement appears in the book’s explanation that the images held in the mind attract corresponding circumstances. After asserting that everything entering a person’s life is attracted through thought, The Secret cites Mulford’s formulation: “Every thought of yours is a real thing—a force.” This sentence gives material weight to an otherwise invisible process. Thought is treated not merely as an interpretation of events but as an active presence capable of influencing what follows.

The book places this teaching inside a much larger genealogy. The law of attraction is called the most powerful law in the Universe, and its presence is traced through poets, musicians, artists, philosophers, religious traditions, and ancient civilizations. The Secret says that the law was recorded in stone in 3000 BC, while Mulford’s nineteenth-century writing demonstrates that the same principle remained available in modern print. His role is thus not to originate the doctrine alone, but to provide a particularly direct modern formulation of its premise: inner images and mental states participate in producing outer experience.

Creating the Day in Advance

Mulford becomes especially concrete when The Secret turns from general belief to the management of an ordinary day. His writings are used to demonstrate that people can apply the law of attraction not only to distant ambitions but also to the next visit, journey, or shopping trip. The book quotes his instruction that when a person expects a pleasant visit or journey, thoughts send “elements and forces ahead” of the body to arrange that experience, whereas fear, apprehension, or bad humor send unseen agencies ahead to produce unpleasantness. Mulford concludes that the state of mind is continually “fixing up” circumstances, good or bad, in advance.

The Secret emphasizes that Mulford wrote these words in the 1870s and calls him a pioneer for recognizing the importance of thinking ahead about every event in the day. In this account, anticipation is not a private mood detached from action; it is a preparatory force that shapes the conditions into which action will occur. The practical contrast is rushing and hurrying. Fear of being late is said to generate the mental frequency associated with further disorder, so continued haste attracts one bad circumstance after another and helps create future situations that require still more haste. The prescribed response is to stop, take a few moments, and shift the state of mind rather than allow fear to organize the day.

Self-Regard and the Overflow of Joy

Mulford’s teaching also supports The Secret’s argument that care for the self is a condition of healthy relationships with others. The book quotes his claim that “looking out for Number One,” when directed by the Infinite, is really looking out for Number Two and is the only way to benefit Number Two permanently. Within the book’s vocabulary, this means that people who habitually put themselves last may attract feelings of unworthiness and undeservingness, then continue attracting circumstances that reinforce those feelings.

The proposed correction is not selfish isolation but an altered source of giving. The Secret argues that a person must fill himself or herself first, attend to joy, and accept responsibility for personal happiness. When joy is cultivated, it naturally overflows into the lives of others; generosity no longer depends on depletion or moral strain. Mulford’s quotation gives historical authority to this reversal of the familiar instruction to sacrifice oneself first: lasting benefit to others begins with the restoration of one’s own inner condition.

Health, Memory, and the Direction of Attention

The Secret invokes Mulford again in its discussion of illness and recovery. It states that people who focus completely on what is wrong and on their symptoms perpetuate the condition, and that healing cannot occur until attention shifts from being sick to being well. Mulford’s formulation is severe and physical: “Let us remember, so far as we can, that every unpleasant thought is a bad thing literally put in the body.” The quotation extends the law of attraction from external circumstances into embodiment, presenting thought as something that can enter and affect the body rather than remain confined to the mind.

The same logic governs the treatment of the past. The Secret quotes Mulford’s warning that a person who sets the mind on the dark side of life and repeatedly lives through past misfortunes and disappointments effectively prays for similar misfortunes in the future. If the future is imagined as nothing but ill luck, the book says, that expectation calls ill luck toward the person. Mulford’s teaching consequently becomes an argument for redirecting attention: resentment, blame, and repeated recollection of difficulty are described as present mechanisms for reproducing difficulty, while deliberate focus on what is wanted is said to release better feelings and open the way to change.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Prentice Mulford’s narrative function is that of an absent teacher whose authority is carried through quotation. He never appears in a contemporary scene, but his words recur at decisive points, allowing The Secret to move from a universal claim about attraction to instructions about expectation, speed, self-love, health, and memory. Each recurrence gives the same governing idea a different field of operation: the mind shapes circumstances before a journey, self-regard shapes relationships, attention shapes bodily experience, and recollection shapes the anticipated future.

His presence also helps The Secret construct a chain of transmission. The book’s creator describes discovering the Secret in a hundred-year-old book given by her daughter Hayley, tracing it through history, and then finding living practitioners through a sequence of linked discoveries. The contemporary co-authors and the teams behind The Secret website and forum are presented as part of that modern circulation, while Mulford stands among the earlier writers whose texts made the teaching legible before its current film, book, and online forms. His authority rests on authorship and historical continuity rather than on a personal appearance or institutional office.

The resulting portrait is deliberately concentrated around a single idea, but its applications are broad. Mulford is remembered as the writer who makes thoughts into forces and mental states into advance arrangements of life. The Secret uses that idea to ask readers to change not only what they desire but what they repeatedly expect, rehearse, and embody. His legacy within the book is therefore less a finished biography than a durable vocabulary for converting inner attention into a program of outward creation.