Warren Felt Evans and Mental Healing: Romantic Idealism and Practical Mysticism in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Warren Felt Evans was the first American mental healer to publish his ideas extensively. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), the father of mental healing in America, bequeathed only scattered manuscripts to his followers. Evans, however, wrote six books that decisively influenced the growth of New Thought, a loosely organized religious movement concerned with health and spiritual integration. This essay contends that Evans' thought and therapy united idealistic philosophy and practical mysticism, thus extending one species of American romanticism, rooted in the Transcendentalist movement, into the latter half of the nineteenth century.