Charles Haanel and Neville Goddard Compared

Charles Haanel and Neville Goddard are the two teachers most readers of New Thought end up comparing. The first was a St. Louis businessman who sold a 24-part course by mail from about 1912. The second was a dancer from Barbados who began publishing in New York in 1939 and lectured until 1972. Both said the inner state comes first and the outer condition follows. They disagreed about almost everything after that.

This page sets the two men side by side from their own texts. For the life, books and lectures of Neville Goddard in full, that link goes to a separate hub with a searchable index of what he said. Here the question is narrower. What did each man teach, where do they meet, and is there any sign the younger one read the older one?

Two lives that barely touch

Haanel was 38 when Neville was born. By the time the younger man printed his first booklet, the older one was in his seventies and his main work was more than a quarter century old. They shared ten years as living authors and, as far as any record shows, never met or wrote to each other.

	Charles F. Haanel	Neville Goddard
Born	May 22, 1866, Ann Arbor, Michigan	February 19, 1905, Barbados
Trade before teaching	Businessman in St. Louis	Stage dancer in New York
First teaching text	The Master Key System, about 1912	At Your Command, 1939
How it reached people	Weekly lessons by mail, then a book in 1916	Live lectures, ten short books, radio and television
Named teacher	None. He quotes Emerson and Troward	A man he called Abdullah
Died	November 27, 1949, aged 83	October 1, 1972, aged 67

Did Neville Goddard read Haanel?

There is no evidence that he did. To test it we searched a collection of his ten main books and 310 transcripts of his talks and lessons, about 1.57 million words dated from 1939 to 1972. The St. Louis author's name does not appear once. Neither does Troward, the English judge quoted in the 24-part course.

The phrase "master key" turns up three times, in two books, and never as a title. His 1945 book on prayer opens with it: "PRAYER is the master key. A key may fit one door of a house, but when it fits all doors it may well claim to be a master key." In 1952 he called the study of his own book "the master key to the conscious attainment of your highest destiny." Both uses are the ordinary figure of speech.

Who Neville did name

The same search shows where his attention went. William Blake is named more than 660 times across 199 of the 320 texts. Emerson, a favorite of the older writer, is named six times. Neville credited his training to Abdullah, a teacher he said he studied with in New York, and he built nearly every talk on a verse of the Bible. The two reading lists hardly overlap.

Where the two agree

Strip away the vocabulary and three ideas are common to both.

• The inner comes first. Haanel wrote that "Mind is creative, and conditions, environment and all experiences in life are the result of our habitual or predominant mental attitude." Neville opened Feeling Is the Secret with "The world, and all within it, is man's conditioned consciousness objectified."
• A deeper part of the mind accepts what it is given. Haanel said the subconscious "cannot argue controversially." Neville said it "does not originate ideas, but accepts as true those which the conscious mind feels to be true."
• Practice is daily. One set an exercise for every week of his course. The other told readers to repeat his method "night after night."

Where they split

The source of the power

The older teacher placed the power in a Universal Mind that each person draws on, a single intelligence behind everything, reached through the subconscious. Neville placed it in the person. He taught that human imagination is God, and he said it flatly: "Consciousness is the one and only reality, not figuratively but actually." In the first view you connect to something larger. In the second there is nothing larger to connect to.

Effort

He sounds like the businessman he was. "Work is necessary, labor, hard mental labor, the kind of effort which so few are willing to put forth." He wanted concentration trained like a muscle, a little longer each week. His counterpart distrusted strain. Once you catch the feeling of the state you want, he wrote, "you are relieved of all effort to make it so, for it is already so."

The mental picture

The course teaches visualization as picture building. You see the place, the photograph, the finished plan, in more detail each time. Neville warned against watching yourself from outside. "Do not visualize yourself at a distance in point of space and at a distance in point of time being congratulated on your good fortune. Instead, make elsewhere here, and the future now." One student looks at the picture. The other stands inside it.

The Bible

The businessman quotes scripture now and then as support for a point he has already made in the language of science. The lecturer read the whole Bible as a story about the reader's own imagination and rarely gave a talk without a text from it.

Which one to read first

Start with the course if you want a program. His course tells you what to do this week, for how long, and what comes next, and it runs for 24 weeks. Start with the lecturer if you want one idea pressed hard in an hour of reading. His books are short and they repeat a single instruction from many sides. The shortest of them, Feeling Is the Secret, takes about an hour.

Many readers end up using both, the course for the discipline of sitting still and holding attention, and the short books for what to do once the attention holds. Neither man's claims have been tested in controlled research, and this guide does not endorse them. What can be checked is what each one wrote, and on that the record is clear. They worked the same ground a generation apart and left no trace of knowing each other.

Questions readers ask

Did Charles Haanel and Neville Goddard ever meet?

No record shows that they met or wrote to each other. Haanel died in 1949 and Neville published his first booklet in 1939, so they shared ten years as living authors, one in St. Louis and one in New York.

Does Neville Goddard mention Haanel in his books or lectures?

No. A search of his ten main books and 310 talk and lesson transcripts, about 1.57 million words, finds no use of the name. The phrase master key appears three times in two of his books, each time as a plain figure of speech.

What is the biggest difference between the two teachers?

They disagree about where the power sits. Haanel taught that each person draws on a Universal Mind through the subconscious. Neville taught that human imagination is God, so for him there was nothing outside the person to draw on.