Interpreters often collect fragments of text to illustrate and reinforce points that they wish to make. In Allen’s hands, this particular fragment becomes comprehensive. It “not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks…This becomes the basis for Allen’s insistence that the way to change your life is to change your thought.
The eclectic base on which he makes his case is clear when he turns almost immediately from familiar Judeo-Christian territory to quote Edwin Arnold’s verse version of the Buddha’s teaching:
“Thought in the mind hath made us. What we are / By thought was wrought and built. If a man’s mind / Hath evil thoughts, pain comes on him as comes / The wheel the ox behind … / If one endure in purity of thought, joy follows him / As his own shadow–sure.”
But it is worth noting that Allen does not present this as some sort of effortless or magical wish fulfillment. He wraps it securely in the Enlightenment tradition of reason. “Man, ” he says, “is a growth by law, and not a creation by artifice, and cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things.”
As a popular writer, Allen seeks to do some of the things that academic writers are doing at just about the same time–extending the rule of law to every corner of the universe, including the human mind, making every corner of the universe, including the human mind, susceptible to rational investigation. Allen is confident that the universe is governed by reason, that this means every effect may be traced to a cause, and that rational reflection on effects will enable individuals to cause the effects they desire.
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