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The
First Era
1870's - 1895
The Founders
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Herbert
Spencer
“The leading traits of a code [of ethics], under which complete
living through voluntary cooperation is secured, may be simply
stated. The fundamental requirement is that the life-sustaining
actions of each shall severally bring him the amounts and kinds of
advantage naturally achieved by them ... the highest life being
reached only when besides helping to complete one another’s lives by
specified reciprocities of aid, men otherwise help to complete one
another’s lives.”
—from The Data of Ethics
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an
inlet to the same and to all of the same. Who hath access to this
universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is
the only and sovereign agent.”
—History
“Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed;
for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the
means, the fruit in the seed.”
—from Compensation
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Walt
Whitman
“I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible
to the whole rest of the earth,
I dream’d that was the new city of friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality
of robust love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions
of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.”
—from Leaves of Grass
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Edwin Markham
“Our hope is in heroic men,
Star-led to build the world again.
To this event the ages ran:
Make way for Brotherhood-
make way for Man.”
—from Brotherhood
“In vain we build the city
if we do not first build the man.”
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Andrew
Carnegie
“Since the civilized world is now united by electric bonds into
one body in constant and instant communication, it is largely
interdependent and rapidly becoming more so. No nation can go to war
now against another nation without going to war against all humanity.
The world has become a family.”
—1907 Andrew Carnegie was then President of the
New York Peace Society
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Mark Twain
“Mark Twain’s religion was a faith too wide for doctrines-a
benevolence too limitless for creeds. From the beginning he strove
against oppression, sham, and evil in every form. He despised
meanness; he resented ... everything that savored of persecution or a
curtailment of human liberties.”
—from Mark Twain, A Biography by Albert Bigelow Paine
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Other prominent members of the original Twilight Club were:
James Howard Bridge, who later became Herbert Spencer’s American
secretary, and who worked with Walter Russell for a number of years in
this movement
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge in the Supreme Court of the United
States, author of The Common Law, friend of Emerson, Lowell and
William James.
John Burroughs, naturalist, who wrote The Gospel of Nature.
Richard Watson Gilder, at that time President and Editor of the Century
magazine.
Henry Holt, the publisher
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