Corpus boundary — James Allen v1

Fixed before any extraction, per the recipe's step 1.

Included — PROOF WORK

  • As a Man Thinketh (1903; Authorized Edition) —
    sources/asamanthinketh_pg4507.txt, Gutenberg #4507.

Unlike most philosopher corpora, this book is tiny (~10k words, seven short
chapters), so v1 mines the whole book as the evidence pool. The seven
chapters are:

  • Foreword + proem (the "Mind is the Master power" verse)
  • Thought and Character — a man is literally what he thinks
  • Effect of Thought on Circumstances — the mind as garden; circumstance reveals, not makes
  • Effect of Thought on Health and the Body — the body as servant of the mind
  • Thought and Purpose — aimlessness is a vice; thought linked to purpose
  • The Thought-Factor in Achievement — individual responsibility is absolute; no achievement without sacrifice
  • Visions and Ideals — dreamers are the saviours of the world
  • Serenity — calmness as the last lesson of culture

Touched, but out of the evidence pool (marked)

  • Allen's other books — From Passion to Peace (named on the title page as
    "Author of…"), The Way of Peace, Eight Pillars of Prosperity, Byways
    of Blessedness    , The Mastery of Destiny, and the daily readers. All are
    public domain, but not ingested for v1. Where a theme leans on Allen, the
    anchor is always As a Man Thinketh, not the wider corpus. A future v2 may
    ingest the other books as their own marked layers.

Excluded from v1

  • Reported material treated as independent authority. Allen quotes a scriptural
    aphorism (Proverbs 23:7, "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he"), an
    unattributed bracketed verse, a "So You will be what you will to be" poem, and
    a long Serenity passage that flows into a Stanton Kirkham Davis quotation.
    These are reported_by_allen: verbatim in the corpus and endorsed by Allen,
    but the words are the reported source's (see QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY).
  • "Best of James Allen" motivational quote collections without an edition trace.
    Allen founded a genre now saturated with paraphrased and mutated "quotes" — the
    most famous ones circulate in forms that are not in this text (see
    QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY).
  • Modern edited/abridged reprints — the Gutenberg standard text is the anchor.

Reason

As a Man Thinketh is the compact seed-crystal of Allen's whole doctrine and of
the modern "thoughts create reality" self-help lineage. Because it is short and
argumentatively self-contained, the honest corpus is simply the whole book: no
chapter needs to be dropped to keep the evidence pool tight.