Prentice Mulford (1887)
Your mind or spirit is continually giving out its force or thought, or receiving some quality of such force, as an electric battery may be sending out its force and be afterward replenished. When you use your force in talking, or writing, or physical effort of any sort, you are positive. When not so using it, you are negative. When negative, or receptive, you are receiving force or element of some kind or quality, which may do you temporary harm or permanent good. All evil of any kind is but temporary. Your spirit’s course through all successive lives is toward the condition of ever increasing and illimitable happiness.
There are poisonous atmospheres of thought as real as the poisonous fumes of arsenic or other metallic vapors. You may, if negative, in a single hour, by sitting with persons in a room whose minds are full of envy, jealousy, cynicism, or despondency, absorb from them a literal poisonous element of thought, full of disease. It is as real as any noxious gas, vapor or miasma. It is infinitely more dangerous, so subtle is its working, for the full injury may not be realized till days afterward, and is then attributed to some other cause.
It is of the greatest importance where you are, or by what element of thought as it comes to you from others, you are surrounded when in the negative or receiving state. Because then you are as a sponge, unconsciously absorbing element, which may do great temporary harm or great permanent good to both mind and body.
During several hours of effort of any kind, such as talking business, or walking, or writing, or superintending your household, or doing any kind of artistic work, you have been positive, or sending out force. You have then to an extent drained yourself of force. If now you go immediately to a store crowded with hurried customers, or to a sick person, or a hospital, or a turbulent meeting, or to a trying interview with some disagreeable individual full of peevishness and quarrelsomeness, you become negative to them. You are then the sponge, drinking in the injurious thought‑element of the crowded store, the sickly thought‑element from the sick‑bed or hospital, the actual poisonous and subtle element from any person or persons, whose minds put out a quality of thought less healthy or cruder than your own.
If you go fatigued in mind or body among a crowd of wearied, feverish, excited people, your strength is not drawn from you by them, for you have little strength to give. But you absorb, and for the time being, make a part of yourself their hurried, wearied thought. You have then cast on you a load of lead, figuratively speaking. As you absorb their quality of thought, you will in many things think as they do and see as they do. You will become discouraged where before you were hopeful. Your plans for business, which, when by yourself, seemed likely to succeed, will now seem impossible and visionary. You will fear where before you had courage. You will possibly become undecided, and in the recklessness of indecision buy what you do not really need, or do something, or say something, or take some hasty step in business, you would not have done had you been by yourself, thinking your own thoughts, and not the clouded thoughts of the crowd around you. You will possibly return home fagged out and sick in mind and body. Through these causes, the person you may meet an hour hence, or the condition of mind in which you are on meeting that person, may cause success or failure in your most important undertakings. For from such person you may absorb a thought which may cause you to alter your plans either for success or failure.
If you must mingle among crowds or with minds whose thoughts are inferior to your own, do so only when you are strongest in mind and body, and leave just so soon as you feel wearied. When strong, you are the positive magnet, driving off their injurious thought‑element. When weak, you become the negative magnet, attracting their thought to you; and such thought is freighted with physical and mental disease.
Positive men are drivers and pushers, and succeed best in the world. Yet it is not well to be always in the positive or force‑sending state of mind; if you are, you will drive from you many valuable ideas. There must be a time for the mental reservoir of force or thought to fill up as well as give that force out. The person always in the positive attitude of mind—he or she who will never hear new ideas without immediately fighting them— who never take a time to give a quiet hearing to ideas which may seem to them wild and extravagant, who insist ever that what does not seem reasonable to them must necessarily be unreasonable for everyone else, such minds will certainly, by constantly maintaining this mental attitude, be drained of all force. On the other hand, the person always negative or always in the receiving state, he or she who “never know their own minds” for two hours at a time, who are swayed unconsciously by everyone with whom they talk, who allow themselves when they go with a plan or a purpose, to be discouraged by a sneer or single word of opposition, are as the reservoir, ever filling up with mud and trash, which at last stops the pipe for distributing water; or in other words, they have their force‑sending capacity almost destroyed, and are unsuccessful in everything they undertake.
As a rule, you must be positive when you have dealings with the world, for very much the same reason that the pugilist must be positive when he stands before his antagonist. You must be negative when you retire from the ring—from active participation in business. You will tire yourself out by constantly standing up before opponents, even in thought, in any sort of contest.