Ideas

Law of Attraction in Haanel's Master Key System

2026-10-10 · About 5 minutes

The law of attraction is the idea most people associate with Charles Haanel today, largely because of the book and film The Secret. But Haanel did not invent the phrase, and his version of it has its own flavor. This page looks at where the law of attraction appears in The Master Key System, how Haanel's account compares with three other New Thought writers, and which parts are belief and which can be checked against evidence.

Quotations come from the public domain 1919 edition, cited by Part and paragraph.

Where it appears in The Master Key System

The phrase runs through the whole course, but a few passages carry most of the weight.

The clearest statement is in Part Eight: "The law of attraction will certainly and unerringly bring to you the conditions, environment, and experiences in life, corresponding with your habitual, characteristic, predominant mental attitude." (VIII, 18) He immediately adds that a passing thought does not count. What matters is "your predominant mental attitude," not what you think "once in a while when you are in church, or have just read a good book."

Part Twenty-One puts the same idea as a magnet: "The predominant thought or the mental attitude is the magnet, and the law is that like attracts like" (XXI, 12). Part Ten, which deals with abundance, describes the law of attraction as "the law by which your "own" is brought to you" in its opening summary.

Haanel also gives a warning example. In Part Seven he describes a man in debt who thinks about the debt constantly and so, by the same law, "actually creates more debt" (VII, 23). The law, in his telling, works on fearful thinking just as surely as on hopeful thinking.

Haanel's distinctive version: love, not force

Two features set Haanel's law of attraction apart.

The first is love. In Part Twelve he writes that the power behind it "is the law of attraction, which is another name for love" (XII, 18), and that "It is the combination of Thought and Love which forms the irresistible force, called the law of attraction." (XII, 21) Part Fifteen repeats the point: "The law of attraction, or the law of love, for they are one and the same" (XV, 11). For Haanel, thought without feeling is not enough. Thought has to be "impregnated with love" to have vitality (XV, 10).

The second is a rule against pressuring others. In the introduction he says: "We are not to try to influence any to do what we think they should do." Trying to do so, he argues, would mean "operating under the law of force, which is destructive in its nature and just the opposite of the law of attraction." He also says you should never seek to take anything from anyone else.

A third, quieter feature is effort. After describing visualization in Part Seven, he says that reading about it will not produce results: "Work is necessary, labour, hard mental labour" (VII, 4). His exercises in concentration and the sitting exercise are meant as that work.

How Haanel compares with other New Thought writers

The phrase "law of attraction" was in circulation decades before The Master Key System. The writer Mitch Horowitz has traced an early use to Andrew Jackson Davis in the 1850s. By the time Haanel published his course in 1912, several New Thought authors had written about it.

Prentice Mulford (1834 to 1891)

Mulford's essays, collected as Your Forces and How to Use Them (published in the late 1880s) and Thoughts Are Things (1889), are often credited with laying out the law of attraction as a general principle. His emphasis is spiritual and personal: thoughts are real forces that shape the thinker's life and health. Haanel knew his work and quotes him in Part Sixteen on the link between success and "spiritual understanding."

William Walker Atkinson (1862 to 1932)

Atkinson's Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906) put the phrase right in the title and stated the rule that like attracts like. He describes thought as vibration, a picture Haanel also uses, especially in his Part on the law of vibration. Atkinson edited New Thought magazines, and Haanel quotes a passage from the magazine Advanced Thought in Part Twenty-Three.

Wallace D. Wattles (1860 to 1911)

Wattles's The Science of Getting Rich (1910) was published by Elizabeth Towne, the same New Thought publisher whose magazine The Nautilus promoted Haanel's course. Wattles is the most openly financial of the group. He teaches that riches come from thinking and acting in a certain way, that gratitude keeps a person connected to the source of supply, and that the reader should create rather than compete. That last idea is close to Haanel's warning against the "law of force."

What is distinctive about Haanel

Compared with these writers, Haanel is more systematic. He arranges the ideas into 24 weekly lessons, ties them to a theory of the conscious and subconscious mind and the nervous system, and attaches a practical exercise to each step. He also makes love central in a way the others do less directly. But the core claim is shared across the whole tradition: your habitual thinking draws matching conditions into your life.

What is belief and what is evidence

It is worth being plain here, because this is where readers most often get hurt or disappointed.

  • History: It is documented that the law of attraction is central to The Master Key System, that the phrase predates Haanel, and that his version shaped later writers, including the makers of The Secret.
  • Belief: The claim that thought draws circumstances to you by a natural law, as gravity draws objects, is a metaphysical belief. Haanel compares it to electricity and gravitation, but he does not offer a test that could prove it wrong, and no one has demonstrated such a law.
  • Evidence against strong versions: Skeptics point out that support for the law of attraction is usually anecdotal, with successes remembered and failures forgotten. A 2023 study by Lucas Dixon and colleagues at the University of Queensland, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that people who strongly believe in manifesting rated themselves as more successful but were not more successful by objective measures, and were more drawn to risky financial choices. The study was correlational, so it shows a pattern, not a cause.
  • A real risk: If thought causes every condition, then illness, accidents and poverty become the sufferer's fault. Critics of The Secret have raised exactly this concern, and readers of Haanel should keep it in mind too. His own example of the man who "creates more debt" can easily turn into self blame.

What a careful reader can take from it

There are milder readings of Haanel's law of attraction that fit everyday experience. What you dwell on shapes what you notice, what you attempt and how you treat other people, and that in turn shapes the responses you get. Clear goals, steady attention and persistence tend to help. Haanel's insistence on work, on love rather than force, and on not taking from others also gives his version a more ethical tone than some later popular versions.

Those practical points do not require a cosmic law. You can test them in your own life without believing that the universe rearranges itself around your thoughts. Read The Master Key System as a historical document and a guide to habits of mind, and you will get more from it than if you treat it as a promise.

References

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