Ernest Holmes

Ernest Shurtleff Holmes was born in 1887 in rural Maine, the youngest of nine children. Largely self-educated, he read voraciously in Emerson, Troward, Quimby, and the emerging field of psychology before moving to California as a young man. He founded the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles in 1927 and built it into one of the most systematically developed metaphysical movements of the twentieth century, eventually becoming Religious Science International.

His magnum opus, 'The Science of Mind,' published in 1926 and revised in 1938, is the most comprehensive attempt in the New Thought tradition to systematise spiritual and mental law into a single coherent philosophy. Holmes drew from a remarkable range of sources - Eastern Vedanta, Christian mysticism, Troward's mental science, Emerson's Transcendentalism, and the early psychology of William James - and synthesised them into what he called a science of consciousness.

His central practice was the 'treatment' - a specific form of affirmative prayer in which the practitioner declares the desired condition to be spiritually true now, reasons through the logic of why it must be so, and releases the outcome in complete confidence. This is not petition but declaration. Holmes distinguished his approach from supplication by insisting that the practitioner is not asking a power outside themselves to act but recognising a power already present within universal mind.

From the DAR perspective, the treatment maps directly onto what CBT calls a behavioural experiment: acting from the assumption that the desired state is already real in order to generate the evidence and neurological patterns that confirm it. Holmes systematised what his predecessors had described intuitively. The 'Science of Mind' reads as a proto-cognitive textbook - a rigorous mapping of the relationship between belief, feeling, and manifested condition that anticipates the cognitive model by several decades. His influence on Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, and the broader self-help tradition of the late twentieth century is foundational.