
The Law and the Word
In brief
The Law and the Word, published in 1917, is a work of mental science and metaphysical instruction by Judge Thomas Troward. It contends that a single Universal Substance animated by a Primary Living Energy responds to directing thought, so that the creative Word governs the impersonal Law through which all things come into form.
Key ideas
- All material existence proceeds from one undifferentiated Universal Substance animated by a Primary Living Energy
- The Law of Unity underlies and connects every level of created being
- Thought-Power acts upon the impersonal, cosmic element present in all things
- The Word holds primacy over the Law, with conscious intention directing the creative principle
- The conquest of death follows as the highest consequence of these creative principles
You already suspect your thought does something to the world. Troward hands you the mechanism and the proof, then asks what you will speak into it. He stops short of the one thing you most want said aloud.
This Book Is: Spirituality · Thought Power · Creativity
Chapters
The Law cannot be changed, and the Word can.
About This Book
There is a Law that cannot be changed, and there is a Word that can. Between these two principles, Troward locates the entire mechanism of creation. The Law is impersonal, mathematical, utterly indifferent to human preference. It responds but never initiates. The Word is something else entirely. It is thought shaped by intention, given force through recognition, spoken into the receptive substance of the universe by a consciousness that knows what it is doing and why. This book is Troward's final sustained inquiry into the relationship between these two forces, and into the question of what happens when a human being learns to operate them together.
Written in the last years of his life, Troward begins where modern science left off in 1917, tracing the implications of etheric vibration and primordial substance not as metaphors but as observable facts pointing toward a single origin. From that origin he builds outward, showing how the law of wholeness binds the visible to the invisible, the part to the whole, the individual mind to the mind that architects galaxies. The progression is deliberate. Each chapter lays a foundation the next chapter requires.
What distinguishes this work is where it arrives. Troward does not stop at the creative power of thought. He follows his own logic to its furthest conclusion: that death itself is not a fixed condition but an unsolved equation, one the principles explored here are designed to address. Not through miracle. Through understanding. The reader who begins with vibrations and substance will end contemplating immortality, and will find, perhaps unexpectedly, that the path between them is continuous.
More like this

Your Invisible Power
1921 · 1h 31m read
You already hold a picture of the life you want, and it is shaping your days whether you tend it or not. Genevieve Behrend, the only personal pupil of Thomas Troward, teaches how that picture is drawn into form from Universal Substance, and names the single power able to hold it back.

The Creative Process in the Individual
1910 · 3h 6m read
One creative order runs from the first movement of Spirit to the thought you hold now. You have probably not been shown that order, or why the same power that builds can also bind. Troward traces it stage by stage and follows it to a conclusion few teachers have been willing to state.

The Doré Lectures
1909 · 2h 7m read
You have been told thought creates, and you have felt nothing move. Troward stands at the gallery lectern and traces the single law behind cosmos and self, then hands you the method for bending it toward your own life. What he withholds is where the law stops being universal and becomes yours.
About this edition
First published 1917.
The book carries a copyright notice dated 1917. Works published in the United States before 1931 are out of copyright there, so this text is in the public domain in the US.
Presented as a reading edition by Better Thought. Typography, chapter titles and glossary links are ours. The words are the author's.
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