are susceptible to confirmation bias and selection bias. Physicist Ali Alousi, for instance, criticized it as unmeasurable and questioned the likelihood that thoughts can affect anything outside the head. The mantra of The Secret, and by extension, the law of attraction, is as follows: positive thoughts and positive visualization will have a direct impact on the self. While positivity can improve one's quality of life and resilience through hardship, it can also be misguiding. Holding the belief that positive thinking will manifest positivity in one's life diminishes the value of hard work and perseverance, such as in the 1970s pursual of "self-esteem-based education". Prominent supporters In 1891, Californian author and humorist Prentice Mulford used the term law of attraction in his essays Some Laws of Health and Beauty and Good And Ill Effects of Thought. In 1897, Ralph Waldo Trine wrote In Tune with the Infinite. In the second paragraph of chapter 9 he writes, "The Law of Attraction works unceasingly throughout the universe, and the one great and never changing fact in connection with it is, as we have found, that like attracts like." In 1902, English New Thought writer James Allen (best known for writing As a Man Thinketh) wrote a series of books and articles between 1901 and 1912, after which his wife Lily continued his work. In 1904, Thomas Troward, a strong influence in the New Thought Movement, gave a lecture in which he claimed that thought precedes physical form and "the action of Mind plants that nucleus which, if allowed to grow undisturbed, will eventually attract to itself all the conditions necessary for its manifestation in outward visible form." In 1906, Emmet Fox wrote about metaphysics and the power of prayer in essays and books. His teachings are founded in Christianity and bible stories. He cites Jesus Christ as being the greatest teacher of metaphysics who ever lived and explains that thoughts are our most important emanation, more important than what we say or what we do. In the books Power Through Constructive Thinking and Find and Use your Inner Power Fox speaks about "building the mental equivalent of what you want and to expunge those that you don't". In 1906, in his New Thought Movement book William Walker Atkinson used the phrase Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, stating that "like attracts like". In 1907, Bruce MacLelland's Prosperity Through