Wallance D. Wattles

No one is kept poor because other peo­ple have monop­o­lized the wealth and have put a fence around it. You may be shut off from engag­ing in busi­ness in cer­tain lines, but there are other chan­nels open to you.

At dif­fer­ent peri­ods the tide of oppor­tu­nity sets in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, accord­ing to the needs of the whole and the par­tic­u­lar stage of social evo­lu­tion which has been reached. There is abun­dance of oppor­tu­nity for the per­son who will go with the tide, instead of try­ing to swim against it.

So work­ers, either as indi­vid­u­als or as a class, are not deprived of oppor­tu­nity. The work­ers are not being “kept down” by their mas­ters; they are not being “ground” by the trusts and big busi­ness. As a class, they are where they are because they do not do things in a cer­tain way.

The work­ing class may become the mas­ter class when­ever they will begin to do things in a cer­tain way. The law of wealth is the same for them as it is for all oth­ers. This they must learn, and they will remain where they are as long as they con­tinue to do as they do. The indi­vid­ual worker, how­ever, is not held down by an entire class’s igno­rance of these laws; he can fol­low the tide of oppor­tu­nity to riches, and this book will tell him how.

No one is kept in poverty by a short­ness in the sup­ply of riches; there is more than enough for all. A palace as large as the capi­tol at Wash­ing­ton might be built for every fam­ily on earth from the build­ing mate­r­ial in the United States alone, and under inten­sive cul­ti­va­tion this coun­try would pro­duce wool, cot­ton, linen, and silk enough to clothe each per­son in the world finer than Solomon was arrayed in all his glory, together with food enough to feed them all luxuriously.

The vis­i­ble sup­ply is prac­ti­cally inex­haustible, and the invis­i­ble sup­ply really is inexhaustible.

Every­thing you see on earth is made from one orig­i­nal sub­stance, out of which all things pro­ceed. New forms are con­stantly being made, and older ones are dis­solv­ing, but all are shapes assumed by one thing.

There is no limit to the sup­ply of form­less stuff, or orig­i­nal sub­stance. The uni­verse is made out of it, but it was not all used in mak­ing the uni­verse. The spaces in, through, and between the forms of the vis­i­ble uni­verse are per­me­ated and filled with the orig­i­nal sub­stance, with the form­less stuff — with the raw mate­r­ial of all things. Ten thou­sand times as much as has been made might still be made, and even then we should not have exhausted the sup­ply of uni­ver­sal raw material.

No one, there­fore, is poor because nature is poor or because there is not enough to go around.

Nature is an inex­haustible store­house of riches; the sup­ply will never run short. Orig­i­nal sub­stance is alive with cre­ative energy, and is con­stantly pro­duc­ing more forms.

When the sup­ply of build­ing mate­r­ial is exhausted, more will be pro­duced. When the soil is exhausted so that food stuffs and mate­ri­als for cloth­ing will no longer grow upon it, it will be renewed or more soil will be made. When all the gold and sil­ver has been dug from the earth, if human­ity is still in such a stage of social devel­op­ment that it needs gold and sil­ver, more will pro­duced from the form­less. The form­less stuff responds to the needs of mankind; it will not let the world be with­out any good thing.

This is true of man col­lec­tively. The race as a whole is always abun­dantly rich, and if indi­vid­u­als are poor it is because they do not fol­low the cer­tain way of doing things which makes the indi­vid­ual rich.

The form­less stuff is intel­li­gent; it is stuff which thinks. It is alive and is always impelled toward more life.

It is the nat­ural and inher­ent impulse of life to seek to live more; it is the nature of intel­li­gence to enlarge itself, and of con­scious­ness to seek to extend its bound­aries and find fuller expres­sion. The uni­verse of forms has been made by form­less liv­ing sub­stance throw­ing itself into form in order to express itself more fully.

The uni­verse is a great liv­ing pres­ence, always mov­ing inher­ently toward more life and fuller functioning.

Nature is formed for the advance­ment of life, and its impelling motive is the increase of life. Because of this, every­thing which can pos­si­bly min­is­ter to life is boun­ti­fully pro­vided. There can be no lack unless God is to con­tra­dict him­self and nul­lify his own works.

You are not kept poor by lack in the sup­ply of riches. It is a fact which I shall demon­strate a lit­tle far­ther on that even the resources of the form­less sup­ply are at the com­mand of the man or woman who will act and think in a cer­tain way.



Science of Getting Rich Series Table of Contents