Warren Felt Evans

Warren Felt Evans
Born	December 23, 1817 Rockingham, Vermont, United States
Died	September 4, 1889
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Philosopher, author
Known for	First author of the New Thought movement

Warren Felt Evans (December 23, 1817 – September 4, 1889) was an American author of the New Thought movement. He became a student of the movement by 1860 or earlier, as shown in recent scholarship (Albanese [2016] and McNeil [2020]). It has commonly been said that in 1863 he visited Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in Portland, Maine, where he learned the principles of mental healing, but Evans never claimed that and even dismissed that belief in an interview with A. J. Swarts in Mental Science Magazine (March, 1888). He was the founder of a mind-cure sanitarium in Salisbury, Massachusetts, and has been referred to as "the recording angel of metaphysics".

Personal life

Born in Rockingham, Vermont, Evans was sixth of seven children. After studying at Chester Academy he entered Middlebury College in 1837, transferring the next year to Dartmouth College. He left in the middle of his junior year for financial reasons. He married M. Charlotte Tinker two years afterwards on June 21, 1840. They had four children, one of whom died very young.

Career

Evans became a Methodist minister in 1838, serving eleven different charges until 1864. That year he left the Methodists and joined the Church of the New Jerusalem after reading the books of Emanuel Swedenborg for several years.

About 1867 he opened a mental medicine office in Claremont, New Hampshire. He and his wife opened an office in Boston. They practiced and informally taught the principles of mental healing there for 20 years.

Charles Braden, a metaphysical historian, wrote that Evans, "was the only important figure, aside from Mrs. Eddy, who attempted to work out a consistent and philosophically supported system of metaphysical healing and mental healing after Quimby."

Writing

Evans was the first to write about the New Thought movement considered by many to have been started by Quimby. His first book on the matter was published three years after Quimby died, and he continued writing for the rest of his life.

• (1869) The Mental Cure (Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body, Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment).
• (1872) Mental Medicine. A Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Medical Psychology.
• (1876) Soul and Body; or, the Spiritual Science of Health and Disease.
• (1881) The Divine Law of Cure.
• (1885) The Primitive Mind Cure. The Nature and Power of Faith; or, Elementary Lessons in Christian Philosophy and Transcendental Medicine. The London edition of the same year was titled Healing by Faith; or, Primitive Mind-Cure. Elementary Lessons in Christian Philosophy and Transcendental Medicine.
• (1886) Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics.

There is an Evans manuscript in the National Library of Medicine comprised of handwritten text over two bound notebooks. The proposed title pages for each volume are shown as follows:

Volume I: [p. 1] “A Practical Application of the Ideal Philosophy to the Cure of Disease.

By W. F. Evans Author of ‘Mental Cure,’ ‘Mental Medicine,’ ‘Soul and Body,’ and ‘Divine Law of Cure.’ ”

[p 2] “Occult Medicine. ‘Power belongs to him who knows.’”

Volume II: [p. 1] “Occult Science of Medicine: A Practical Application of Idealism to the Cure of Disease.

By W. F. Evans Author of ‘Mental Cure,’ ‘Mental Medicine,’ ‘Soul & Body,’ and ‘The Divine Law of Cure.’

‘Power belongs to him who knows.’”

Even though the two titles differ somewhat, the two volumes of manuscript are clearly for one proposed book.

Earlier books were:

• (1860) The Happy Islands; or, Paradise Restored
• (1860) Divine Order in the Process of Full Salvation
• (1862) The Celestial Dawn; or Connection of Earth and Heaven
• (1864) The New Age and Its Messenger

The book Divine Order in the Process of Full Salvation was produced in a second edition in 1883 by J. A. Campbell, M.D., in Rochester, New York. A complete reprint of the text appeared in the July, 1868, issue of the periodical, The Primitive Methodist Magazine (London: William Lister, 1868), pp. [385]-399. Inexplicably, the name of W. F. Evans does not appear, rather the name of George Warner of Belfast appears at the end of the piece, not necessarily as its author but rather at least as the contributor.

The journals of Evans, now at Dartmouth College, were transcribed and printed in 2016 by Catherine Albanese.

References

6. Albanese, Catherine (2016). The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans from Methodism to Mind Cure, edited by Catherine Albanese. Bloomington, IN: [2016]. p, 303

7. McNeil, Keith (2020). A Story Untold: A History of the Quimby-Eddy Debate. Carmel, IN: Hawthorne Publishing, 2020. Three vols. Chapter Six is a biography of the early life of Evans, and part of Chapter Seven covers the rest of his life.