Here is stated the principle that was to govern his thinking to the end of his days, though he would describe it in different terms at different times. Mind, he explained in an early letter, is the name of “the fluids of the body,” by which he apparently meant the magnetic or “electro-nervous” fluids which are so prominent in the literature of animal magnetism, and he added, “Disease is the name of the disturbance of these fluids or mind.”⁵ Later he came more and more to speak of mind as “spiritual matter” and to describe the mental atmosphere in which disease was formed as a “spiritual” identity, but his idea of spirit remained largely that of the materialist Hobbes [for whom] spirit is “a physical body refined enough to escape the observation of the senses.”⁶ As late as 1861 Quimby wrote: “My foundation is animal matter, or life. This, set in action by Wisdom, produces thought.”⁷

Quimby’s development was probably influenced by a much-discussed book entitled The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology by John Bovee Dods which was published in 1850 with an endorsement by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other prominent figures.⁸ Dods had written an earlier book, Six Lectures on the Philosophy of Mesmerism, and for a time he lured Lucius Burkmar away from Quimby to become his own mesmeric subject, although Burkmar later returned to Quimby until the latter finally dispensed with him altogether.

Even in his earlier book Dods had written: “I consider ‘Animal Magnetism’ a very inappropriate name. . . . As it is the science of mind and its powers, so it is the highest and most sublime science in the whole realms of nature, and as far transcends all others as godlike  ● ● ●