The Science of Being Great by Wallace D. Wattles is a study of identity, thought, character, purpose, self-government, action, service, faith, and the source of genuine greatness. Rather than defining greatness merely through wealth, social position, intelligence, fame, or domination over others, Wattles argues that the capacity for greatness already exists within ordinary people and must be consciously developed through right thought and right action.
The book is especially useful for biblical examination because Wattles repeatedly speaks about God, divine intelligence, service, faith, Jesus Christ, and the possibility of man expressing something greater than his present circumstances. Many of these ideas have strong biblical parallels, particularly the renewal of the mind, the indwelling Spirit, sonship, service, self-government, and Christ's definition of greatness. Wattles' New Thought metaphysics should nevertheless remain subject to the King James Bible, preserving God as the source and Christ as the life through which true greatness is expressed.
Listen to The Science of Being Great
Wallace D. Wattles • Complete audiobook
About The Science of Being Great
Wattles begins with a radical proposition: greatness is not reserved for a special class of human beings. Circumstances, education, heredity, money, and opportunity can influence development, but he refuses to treat any of them as the final definition of what a person can become. The central question is therefore not whether greatness exists somewhere outside us, but what source of life is already available and how faithfully we participate in it.
Scripture gives an even deeper foundation for that possibility. The believer is not merely an improved version of Adam attempting to manufacture greatness through willpower. He is joined to Christ, indwelt by the Holy Ghost, and called to walk from a new identity.
Any Person May Become Great
Wattles refuses the assumption that extraordinary capability belongs only to people born with unusual advantages. He argues that human beings can develop intelligence, judgment, courage, character, usefulness, and power through conscious growth. This does not mean every person will occupy the same office or express greatness in the same form, but it does reject the idea that present limitations must become permanent identity.
Scripture likewise distinguishes present maturity from ultimate identity. Paul could address believers who were still immature while simultaneously declaring that they belonged to Christ. Growth was needed, but their present weakness did not erase what God had already established.
Heredity and Opportunity Are Not Sovereign
Wattles challenges deterministic thinking concerning heredity and environment. A person may inherit disadvantages or begin life with fewer opportunities, but those conditions do not necessarily determine the full boundary of future development. Circumstances are real, yet they do not have to become gods whose present testimony can never be overturned.
Scripture repeatedly introduces people whose future greatly exceeded their visible beginnings. David was a shepherd before he was king, Joseph was a prisoner before he governed Egypt, and the apostles were ordinary men before Christ sent them into the world. God's call repeatedly reaches beyond the apparent limits of present circumstances.
The Source of Power
Wattles' third chapter asks where genuine power originates. His answer moves beyond muscle, social influence, education, and external possessions toward a deeper spiritual source. This becomes one of the most important places to compare his metaphysical framework with Scripture.
The Bible does not present the independent human personality as the ultimate source of power. Power flows from God, while the believer participates through union with Him. This allows genuine human action without requiring autonomous self-deification.
Christ Gives the Proper Model of Power
Jesus possessed extraordinary authority, yet He repeatedly described His works relationally. His greatness did not consist in declaring independence from the Father. The Son's power operated through perfect union, agreement, and participation with the Father.
This gives the believer a powerful safeguard. Greatness does not require becoming independent from God. Biblical greatness becomes possible precisely because divine life can work through the person who remains joined to the source.
The Mind of God
Wattles speaks strongly about coming into relationship with the mind of God. His language sometimes moves toward New Thought ideas about universal mind, but Scripture itself contains remarkably strong language concerning participation in divine thought. The believer is not left permanently confined to the carnal mind as though another way of perceiving reality were unavailable.
This does not mean every thought appearing in a Christian's mind automatically equals God's thought. It means Christ provides another governing mind from which judgment, wisdom, identity, and action can increasingly proceed.
Preparation
Greatness requires preparation because capacity must normally develop before greater responsibility can be stewarded well. Desire may reveal where someone wants to go, but desire without development can place a person inside responsibilities he is not yet equipped to handle. Skills, knowledge, character, patience, judgment, and discipline therefore become part of the preparation for greater expression.
Scripture repeatedly connects faithfulness in small things with greater responsibility. Increase is not merely something to desire; it is something to become capable of carrying.
The Social Point of View
Wattles warns against becoming mentally governed by the limitations accepted by society. Collective beliefs can become powerful because individuals inherit assumptions concerning what people like them can earn, build, become, understand, or accomplish. Social agreement can therefore function as a ceiling even when no physical law requires that ceiling to remain.
Scripture likewise warns against allowing the world's pattern to become the governing pattern of consciousness. The answer is not isolation from society, but renewal of judgment so that truth rather than conformity determines the mind.
The Individual Point of View
Wattles then turns toward individual responsibility. It is easy to blame society, circumstances, history, family, competitors, employers, or other people for every limitation. Some external obstacles are genuine, but personal agency still exists within circumstances that were not personally chosen.
The useful question becomes what belongs to us now. We may not control every event, but we can govern our response, develop ability, seek wisdom, create value, change direction, forgive, prepare, and take useful action. Responsibility becomes power when it is applied to what is actually ours to steward.
Consecration
Wattles uses consecration to describe the wholehearted commitment of oneself toward a higher purpose. Scattered desire produces scattered action, while consecration brings thought, intention, and behavior into greater unity. A person cannot continually move in opposite directions and expect concentrated results.
Scripture gives consecration an explicitly God-centered meaning. The body, mind, work, and abilities are offered to God rather than merely being organized around personal ambition.
Identification
Wattles recognizes that people tend to express the identity with which they continually identify. Someone who repeatedly experiences himself as powerless will interpret opportunity differently from someone who expects himself to learn, grow, and act effectively. Identity therefore sits upstream from many outward decisions.
Christianity gives identification a deeper foundation through union with Christ. The believer is not instructed merely to invent an impressive self-concept. Scripture establishes identification with the death and resurrection of Christ.
The Old Identity Does Not Need Endless Repair
Personal-development systems often attempt to make Adam increasingly powerful, confident, disciplined, and successful without addressing the identity from which the entire project begins. Scripture takes a more radical route. The old man is crucified with Christ, and resurrection introduces newness of life.
Idealization
Wattles encourages forming a clear conception of the kind of person one intends to become. An ideal provides direction because individual decisions can then be compared with a larger picture of character, capability, service, and purpose. Without an ideal, development easily becomes reactive and scattered.
Scripture gives the believer an objective ideal that does not need to be invented from nothing. Christ Himself becomes the pattern toward which transformation moves.
Realization
An ideal remains abstract until it becomes inwardly believable and practically expressed. Wattles' realization chapter concerns moving from merely admiring greatness toward consciously inhabiting the qualities one seeks to express. The person begins acting from the developing identity instead of continually waiting for external recognition to grant permission.
Scripture gives this principle an accomplished foundation in Christ. The believer does not wait for circumstances to announce sonship, acceptance, righteousness, or union before receiving those truths. God establishes them first, and life increasingly grows outward from what has been received.
Hurry and Habit
Wattles warns that greatness is inconsistent with continual hurry. Hurry often comes from fear, scarcity, and the belief that everything depends upon forcing immediate results before an opportunity disappears. That state can produce poor judgment, unfinished work, unnecessary risk, and habitual reaction.
Deliberate action is different from slowness. A person can move quickly while remaining governed by clarity instead of panic. Scripture repeatedly connects spiritual maturity with patience, self-government, and sound judgment.
Thought
Thought occupies a central place in Wattles' entire system because action normally proceeds from some prior interpretation, belief, intention, or desire. Repeated thought creates familiar pathways that influence what appears possible and what response feels natural. A person therefore cannot treat the inward world as unrelated to outward life.
Scripture gives direct instruction concerning deliberate thought. The goal is not merely positive thinking but disciplined attention toward what is true and worthy.
Thought Must Be Governed by Truth
Not every thought deserves agreement. Fear creates imagined futures, pride can justify itself, resentment can rehearse offenses, and desire can rationalize what Scripture forbids. The existence of an inward thought therefore does not establish its authority.
Greatness requires governing thought rather than merely having many thoughts. The mind becomes useful when it serves truth.
Action at Home
Wattles makes greatness practical by insisting that character must first appear in ordinary surroundings. Someone can dream about extraordinary influence while remaining impatient, dishonest, careless, or unfaithful with the people and responsibilities closest to him. Greatness that exists only in imagination has not yet become character.
Scripture similarly begins stewardship with what is already present. Faithfulness in ordinary work becomes evidence that larger responsibility can be carried without destroying the person entrusted with it.
Action Abroad
Greatness eventually moves outward into business, society, leadership, ministry, relationships, creative work, and service. Wattles argues that a genuinely great person does not enter those arenas merely seeking recognition. He enters them carrying an increasing capacity to improve what comes within his influence.
This makes usefulness a better measure than fame. Someone may have enormous public recognition while producing little lasting good, while another person may quietly transform families, customers, employees, communities, or industries through useful work.
Some Further Explanations
Wattles repeatedly distinguishes greatness from arrogance. Believing that greater capacity can be developed does not require despising other people. Genuine strength becomes increasingly capable of recognizing potential in others because another person's growth does not diminish our own.
Scripture directly warns against self-exaltation while still calling believers into extraordinary identity. Humility is not pretending that God has given nothing. It is recognizing the source of whatever has been given.
More About Thought
Wattles returns again to thought because inner patterns are persistent. One moment of clarity does not necessarily erase years of habitual fear, inferiority, anger, haste, or conformity. Transformation becomes increasingly visible as the renewed interpretation becomes more natural than the old one.
Scripture likewise presents renewal as an ongoing process rather than a reason for condemnation whenever an old reaction appears. The believer can already belong to Christ while still learning how to think from that identity.
Jesus' Idea of Greatness
This is one of the most important chapters in the entire book because Wattles turns directly to Christ's definition of greatness. Jesus overturns the ordinary model in which greatness means possessing enough power to make everyone else serve you. In the Kingdom, greater capacity creates greater ability to serve.
This does not mean becoming weak, passive, poor, or incapable. Service requires capability. Greater resources, intelligence, influence, skill, courage, and authority become increasingly valuable when they are directed toward producing life rather than merely extracting submission.
The Greatest Becomes the Most Useful
Christ fundamentally changes the measurement system. Instead of asking how many people can be forced beneath us, the question becomes how much genuine good can flow through the capacity God has given. Business, leadership, wealth, knowledge, and authority can therefore become forms of service when they materially increase the lives of others.
Jesus possessed unmatched authority and simultaneously used that authority to heal, teach, deliver, feed, forgive, and ultimately give His life. Biblical greatness joins power with service.
A View of Evolution
Wattles speaks of life moving toward greater expression, development, intelligence, and capability. His philosophical explanation reflects the New Thought environment in which he wrote, and those claims should not replace the biblical account of creation. Yet the broader observation that living things develop toward maturity has obvious biblical parallels.
Scripture expects growth. A babe in Christ is not condemned for beginning as a babe, but remaining permanently immature is not presented as the objective. Life moves toward fruitfulness and greater capacity.
Serving God
Wattles ultimately places greatness within service to God rather than self-glorification. This gives the entire book a useful governing test. Whatever capacity is developed should increase the person's ability to express truth, create value, serve people, exercise stewardship, and accomplish useful work.
Scripture makes service concrete by connecting love for God with what is done toward people. Spirituality that produces no outward fruit remains incomplete.
A Mental Exercise
Wattles concludes with deliberate mental practice because habitual thought rarely changes accidentally. The mind can repeatedly return to an ideal of courage, wisdom, usefulness, composure, faith, and strength until those qualities become increasingly natural in action. Biblical renewal similarly requires deliberate attention rather than passive conformity.
The safest Christian exercise begins with Christ rather than constructing an autonomous ideal of greatness. Ask what the risen Christ reveals about identity, love, courage, service, power, self-control, wisdom, and relationship with the Father, then allow those truths to govern the interpretation of present circumstances.
Greatness Is Not the Same as Fame
The world frequently confuses visibility with greatness. Fame measures how many people know a person's name, but it does not necessarily measure wisdom, character, service, usefulness, courage, or faithfulness. Someone can become famous without becoming great, while genuine greatness may exist without public recognition.
Jesus repeatedly warns against constructing righteousness around being seen by men. The Father's measurement reaches deeper than public applause.
Greatness Is Not Domination
Authority can be useful, but domination is not the biblical definition of greatness. A leader who possesses power but destroys everyone beneath him may be powerful without being great. Christ measures power according to what it produces.
Greatness therefore requires strength and restraint together. The capacity to enforce, the wisdom to preserve, and the ability to synthesize both toward useful service form a more complete expression than aggression alone.
Greatness Begins With Identity
If greatness must prove identity, the person becomes permanently dependent upon achievement. Every victory temporarily produces worth while every failure threatens to erase it. Scripture gives another order by establishing identity in Christ before external achievement is measured.
Achievement can then become expression rather than proof. The believer is free to become powerful, skillful, wealthy, knowledgeable, productive, and influential without asking those things to create completeness.
The Risen Christ Redefines Human Potential
Christian greatness cannot stop with the example of the historical Jesus as though believers remain permanently separated spectators. Scripture describes union with the risen Christ and places His life within His people. The potential being developed is therefore connected with a source greater than isolated human effort.
A Biblical Practice of Becoming Great
Begin with identity.
Do not ask achievement, wealth, fame, or approval to create what God has already established in Christ.
Recognize the source.
Ability can be developed intensely while God remains the source of life, wisdom, power, opportunity, and increase.
Choose an ideal.
Let Christ define the qualities of greatness rather than allowing culture alone to decide what a great person looks like.
Renew the mind.
Identify inherited assumptions, social limitations, fear, hurry, inferiority, or pride that contradict the life you are called to express.
Develop capacity.
Learn, practice, build skills, increase discipline, and become capable of stewarding greater responsibility.
Govern yourself first.
Do not seek authority over others while remaining ruled by anger, fear, impulse, distraction, or appetite.
Act where you are.
Express faithfulness inside present responsibilities rather than waiting for a larger stage before becoming useful.
Increase others.
Measure power partly by how much genuine good your work, business, leadership, and relationships produce for other people.
Serve without shrinking.
Service does not require weakness. Develop greater capability so that greater value can flow through what you have been given.
Remain joined to Christ.
The branch becomes fruitful through union with the vine rather than by declaring independence from its source.
Reading Wallace Wattles Through Scripture
The Science of Being Great contains strong observations concerning personal development, identity, thought, habit, self-government, preparation, service, and the distinction between social limitation and genuine human capacity. Wattles also deserves attention for placing Jesus' definition of greatness near the center of his argument rather than reducing greatness to money or domination.
Scripture supplies the governing framework. God remains the source of power, Christ remains the believer's identity and life, the Holy Ghost remains the indwelling presence, and service becomes the proper expression of increased capability. Greatness is therefore not self-deification but increasingly unhindered participation in the life God gives.
- Does God remain the source of power?
- Am I developing genuine capacity or merely seeking recognition?
- Does my ideal of greatness agree with Christ?
- Am I governing myself before attempting to govern others?
- Is increased power producing increased service?
- Does my work materially increase the lives of other people?
- Does identity remain established in Christ?
- Does growth produce greater faithfulness, wisdom, strength, and love?
The Central Principle
Wattles' strongest conclusion is that greatness is not something reserved for a distant class of exceptional people. Human beings can develop greater intelligence, discipline, courage, usefulness, influence, and power when thought, identity, preparation, and action begin moving together. Yet Scripture reveals that the Christian source of greatness is deeper than human self-development alone.
Jesus gives the final measurement. Greatness is not the number of people beneath you but the capacity you possess to serve, create, protect, teach, build, heal, give, lead, and increase others. The stronger the vessel becomes, the more life it can carry when it remains joined to the source.
Develop the mind, discipline the habits, enlarge the ability, refuse limiting identities, act faithfully where you are, and become increasingly useful. But keep the order intact: God is the source, Christ is the life, and greatness becomes visible through the fruit.