Mesmerism in America yielded a very popular mind-cure philosophy that predisposed Americans to consider psychology a means for tapping unconscious psychic forces for the general betterment of the person.
The phenomenal 1897 bestseller, In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine, exemplified this "transcendentalist" characteristic of American popular thought. Until the appearance of the not dissimilar Power of Positive Thinking (1952) by Norman Vincent Peale, Trine's book was the biggest selling inspirational book of the twentieth century. In it, the author offered his readers peace of mind through a meditative, ecumenical approach for achieving psychic oneness with God. Though not a book of psychology, In Tune with the Infinite drew on the concept of the unconscious as a deep spiritual reservoir. Trine urged the reader "to come into the full realization of your own awakened interior powers":
There is a mystic force that transcends the powers of the intellect and likewise of the body. There are certain faculties that we have that are not a part of the active, thinking mind.… Through them we have intuitions, impulses, leadings, that instead of being merely the occasional, should be the normal and habitual.
As formally trained psychologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists entered the fray of popular literature, they often seemed to be saying much the same thing, but in a secular form and with titles that were less ethereal, more "scientific" or simply duller.
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