The Science of Getting Rich: The Classic That Helped Inspire The Secret

“The science of getting rich,” Wattle tells us, “is the noblest and most necessary of all studies.”

There’s something very American about this guy’s optimism and entitlement to being rich. Anybody can be rich, Wattle said, and it has very little to do with your environment or even what your profession is. It’s a bit hard to take him seriously in the 21st century when he writes “no man is kept poor because opportunity has been taken away from him; because other people have monopolized the wealth, and have put a fence around it.” Hey, Wallace, wait’ll you see what happens in a hundred years!

Poor aging that bit has done aside, there’s something to be said for how relentlessly Wattle believes that any and all of us are entitled to be rich, and how it’s not exactly kneeling before capitalism. The working class, according to Wattle, only needs to recognize the opportunities for the class to become rich, in the form of starting co-operatives and electing men of their own class to office to pass laws that are friendlier to small businesses. It’s a bit of victim-blaming to say that it’s the working class’s fault but he’s certainly not wrong to suggest that true power lies within the people.

Wattle gets a little New Age-y from there, how the universe has a never-ending supply of Formless Stuff and Original Substance and because of that, Nature is always producing riches. The world is already pretty rich and we’re not kept poor because of a lack of riches. There’s more than enough to go around, we’re just poor because we are not doing things a Certain Way.

Wattle also tells you to take things on faith and to not listen to anything else that may tell you otherwise and to not question why it is the way it is. Kinda like a cult! And he says that God wants us to be rich! After all, God “can live more in you if you have unlimited command of the means of life.” If you say so, big guy!

Jest aside, the section on gratitude is genuinely useful in the sense that it’s always good to be reminded to practice gratitude. He also talks about visualization without naming it, by encouraging us to create a very clear mental image of exactly what it is that we want.

The truly wild thing about The Science of Getting Rich is how influential it has been to future self-help books despite being published over a hundred years ago:

“Something inside of me had me turn the pages one by one, and I can still remember my tears hitting the pages as I was reading it. It gave me a glimpse of The Secret. It was like a flame inside of my heart. And with every day since, it’s just become a raging fire of wanting to share all of this with the world.”

That’s an actual quote from Rhonda Byrne talking about her experience reading the book. She specifically cited this book as foundational to her smash 2006 bestseller The Secret, which has sold over 30 million copies and was something of a cultural phenomenon. Wattles also laid the foundation for other popular financial success books like Charles F. Haanel’s The Mastery Key System (1912) and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1930).

To be sure, The Secret has had a lot of critics who have dismissed its contents who claim there is no quantum physics or any other kind of scientific foundation to support the claims the book (and others like it) have made. Mark Manson, the guy who wrote the popular The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2016), called it a “playbook for entitlement and self-absorption.” When Barbara Ehrenreich published Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009), she claimed that books like The Secret, she talked about the social and political dangers of this kind of toxic positivity, particularly when living under systemic oppression.

Still, if we were to employ some of the concepts The Science of Getting Rich (and The Secret) proposes, then there could be quite a bit to be gained just by focusing on the positive benefits of positive thinking — and that’s part of what makes books like these so compelling and seducing. Read on and find out for yourself!  

Click on the cover to buy your own copy of The Science of Getting Rich!

Cover Image: Gold bar image is by Stevebidmead per Wikimedia Commons. Book cover image of the author is circa 1910 and credited to Publisher Elizabeth Towne and is per Wikimedia Commons.

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