"Felt Needs" etymology

I'm trying to track down the origin of the term "felt needs". Did a library search on Everything and got back ten hits that go back to 1977. Google wasn't much help to me. Perhaps my Google-fu is weak tonight.

Does anyone have earlier citations or strategies for tracking this down?

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Tom Reynolds

Here's its appearance in a book review from 1966 (in the first line) https://academic.oup.com/cdj/article-abstract/2/7/44/329277/BOOK-REVIEWS?redirectedFrom=PDF It would seem to be a standard term in development lingo by that point.

Justin Gatlin

An ngram search brought this up from 1905: https://books.google.com/books?id=yTpFAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA254&dq=%22felt+needs%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_o8v1icfWAhWJ6CYKHZcEAdc4FBDoAQgoMAE#v=onepage&q=%22felt%20needs%22&f=false

Justin Gatlin

Actually, searching for "felt need" turned it up in exactly the modern religious usage from approximately 1870 on, but even then it is not really defined (maybe because it was already in use, or maybe the term is just clear).

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22felt+need%22&lr=lang_en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1898,lr:lang_1en,sbd:1&tbm=bks&prmd=svin&ei=7n_MWafmLMPJmwGy-rnoAg&start=20&sa=N&biw=768&bih=985&dpr=2

William Gabriel

Thank you both. That was very helpful. The last link shows usage even in 1848. In Thomas Boston Vol 3, it says, "It was felt need brought the prodigal home to his father's house. ... For none will ever come back to the Lord, but those whom felt need drives..."

I had read a book a few years ago that used the term 13 times, and it wasn't really explicitly defined. You can mostly gauge its semantic meaning through context in all those uses, but I think that many times today, different people mean different things by it.

My current project has me going through a workbook that uses the term. Again, so far, it's inadequately defined. Seeing it pop up in different places made me curious about where it got started since it's not really a biblical concept.