What is the law of assumption?
The law of assumption is Neville Goddard’s rule that whatever you accept as true, and keep accepting, hardens into fact, so you take on the feeling of the wish fulfilled before any evidence shows up. He ranked it with physics. When you assume, he wrote, “you are conforming to a law just as real as the law governing magnetism.”
The phrase is rarer than its fame suggests. It turns up 48 times in 1.57 million words of his, and 44 of those sit in a single book from 1952.
Where the words live
Every use, on a strip of 1.57 million words
The band is everything of his we hold, 320 texts end to end from 1939 to 1972, each as wide as its word count. The three ribbons beneath it are the only texts that light up, drawn at one shared scale. Drag along a ribbon or tap it to read each sentence.
Move along the band to name a text.
The counts as a table
| Text | Year | Words | Uses | Per 10,000 |
|---|
| Chapter of The Power of Awareness | Uses |
|---|
The earliest use we can date is July 1951, when he gave a talk on station KECA in Los Angeles under that title. The book followed in 1952 with 44 uses, fourteen of them packed into the Case Histories chapter, where he names the law each time a story turns. Then he drops it. In the 17 years after the book it comes up once, in a talk from February 28, 1969: “apply the law of assumption. Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled and let God’s law work for you.”
He kept teaching it under a shorter name. By 1961 the book title has cut it down to The Law, set against the Promise, and that is what he calls it in talks from then on. On the surviving text, anyone searching the term today is using a label Neville leaned on for about a year.
Atkinson, 1906. Neville, 1944 to 1969.
Law of assumption vs law of attraction
William Walker Atkinson put the words on a cover in 1906, with Thought Vibration, subtitled The Law of Attraction in the Thought World. Neville’s first book came 33 years later. For Atkinson a thought leaves you as a wave, travels, and pulls its match back to you, and the pull grows with desire. The law of attraction as he states it is about what you send out. Neville’s law is about where you stand: he says wanting moves nothing, and that what comes to you is what you already accept as so.
| The question | Atkinson, Thought Vibration | Neville |
|---|---|---|
| What does the work? | “When we think we send out vibrations of a fine ethereal substance, which are as real as the vibrations manifesting light, heat, electricity, magnetism.” | “Your assumptions, conscious or unconscious, direct all thought and action to their fulfillment.” The Power of Awareness, 1952 |
| What is wanting worth? | “The stronger the Desire the greater the force set into motion.” | “It is not what you want that you attract; you attract what you believe to be true.” Prayer: The Art of Believing, 1945 |
| Who answers? | “We attract to us the thoughts of others of the same order of thought.” | “if it takes a thousand men to aid the birth of that state, a thousand men will play their parts” Live In The End, 1968 |
| What do you do? | “Set your mind to the keynote of Courage, Confidence and Success.” | “Ignore the present state and assume the wish fulfilled.” The Power of Awareness, 1952 |
| When does it land? | “You are today setting into motion thought currents which will in time attract toward you thoughts, people and conditions” | “The future must become the present in your mind if you would wisely operate the law of assumption.” The Power of Awareness, 1952 |
| What is the world made of? | “the difference is solely in the rate of vibration.” | “All phenomena are formed of the same substance vibrating at different rates.” Prayer: The Art of Believing, 1945 |
That last row is where the two men agree. In Prayer: The Art of Believing Neville writes vibration or a form of it 33 times, describing mental messages that wake their “vibratory correlates” in the person they reach, and it reads closer to Atkinson than anything else he published. The verb stays with him too. In 1949 he finds his imagination “endowed with the magnetic power to attract to me whatsoever I desire,” and in 1969 he says “People feeling poor attract poverty.” So the claim that Neville taught the law of attraction fails on the phrase, which he never used, and holds in part on the idea.
The method
How to do it, in his steps
Chapter 19 of The Power of Awareness is called Essentials and numbers three points. The last two below come from later chapters of the same book.
- Desire
Want it hard. He opens with “yearning; longing; intense, burning desire,” and says you must want to be different from what you are.
- Physical immobility
Bring the body to rest in the drowsy condition he calls a state akin to sleep. He says it comes easiest after a big meal, or in the morning when you would rather stay in bed.
- The assumption of the wish already fulfilled
Now “experience in your imagination what you would experience in reality had you achieved your goal.” He wants you inside the scene, “not as an onlooker thinking of the end, but as a partaker thinking from the end.” That shift is what he means by living in the end.
- Persist
He asks for repetition, night after night. “To continue in the perfect law of liberty is to persist in the assumption that your desire is already fulfilled.”
- Let it turn natural
He says the time an assumption takes “is directly proportionate to the naturalness of your feeling of already being what you want to be.” Repeat the scene until it feels ordinary.
Chapter 24
When it does not work, by his account
He gave failure its own chapter, which most summaries skip. Say you followed the steps, persisted, and got nothing. He puts the cause in one sentence: “The fact that it does not feel natural to you to be what you imagine yourself to be is the secret of your failure.” His picture for this is a man chained to an iron bench, who cannot run but can imagine running, and for that moment forgets the chain.
He also warns against aiming at objects. “One of the greatest pitfalls in attempting to use the law of assumption is focusing your attention on things, on a new home, a better job, a bigger bank balance.” The target is the state of being the person who already has them.
His evidence is testimony, and he says so. He told one student the law’s power “could be discovered only through experience,” and every proof in the book is a story someone brought him. We found no controlled test of the law as he states it. The closest thing science has looked at is the drowsy state he prescribes, and what sleep researchers measured there is a separate question from whether assumptions harden into fact.
Questions
The law of assumption
Did Neville ever mention William Walker Atkinson?
Not once. Atkinson's name appears nowhere in the 320 texts we hold, and neither does the phrase law of attraction. Neville did move in the same world: a short piece of his called Fundamentals ran in the INTA Bulletin, New Thought, in summer 1953.
Did Neville Goddard coin the term law of assumption?
His earliest use in the texts we hold is the title of a radio talk on station KECA in Los Angeles, July 1951. We searched his work only, so we cannot say no earlier writer used those words. What we can say is that nearly all his own uses sit in one book, The Power of Awareness, 1952.
Which Neville book explains the law of assumption best?
The Power of Awareness. It holds 44 of the 48 uses, a chapter called Essentials with his steps, a chapter on failure, and a long section of case histories. It runs to about 21,500 words.
How long does an assumption take to become fact?
He gives no number of days. He says the time is directly proportionate to how natural the feeling of already being it has become. His own discharge story took nine days. Other stories in the same book take a day, or years.
Can you use the law of assumption on someone else's behalf?
Yes, and he says to do it without telling them. In the 1968 talk Live in the End he tells people to lift a friend up in imagination and to keep quiet about it. The 1945 book Prayer: The Art of Believing builds a whole chapter on it.
Sources
What we read for this page
- Neville, The Power of Awareness, 1952. Scan, read against a second OCR in the merged archive where the first is garbled.
- Neville, “The Law of Assumption,” radio talk, station KECA, Los Angeles, July 1951, in the radio lectures transcript.
- Neville, “Believe In Him,” February 28, 1969, and “The State Of Vision,” February 26, 1968.
- Neville, Prayer: The Art of Believing, 1945; Out of This World, 1949; “The Game Of Life,” March 7, 1969; “Live In The End,” July 19, 1968.
- William Walker Atkinson, Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, 1906.
- Counts are ours, taken from the 320 texts in our index, 1,573,433 words. Machine-read transcripts can hide a use, which is how one split across a line break nearly got missed here. His words stay his, and we claim no rights in them.