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The UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY has just been incorporated in Virginia as the first university ever formed which recognizes that the wealth and power of the world lies in man himself. This new university also recognizes the fact that man is a spiritual creation whom God endowed with inner power to have dominion over all the earth through knowledge of his own inherent power, instead of being but a unit in the world-machine.
It fully recognizes that man is the greatest, and highest, product of God, and that the great need of this chaotic world is to make man know his own value to man through knowing himself, instead of measuring his value as a material producing machine. The marvelous educational facilities of our schools and universities have given man fine and necessary techniques that have enabled him to build a world full of wondrous things in the last hundred years, but he has also built a world of fear and hate which is even now threatening the survival of man himself. The great question of all this is whether we have not gone too dangerously far in the attempt to build luxury for man at the expense of his Soul, by placing material values ahead of spiritual ones? Have we not done what the great poet Edwin Markham feared we were doing when he expressed his fear in these words: "In vain do we build the city if we do not first build the man"? Have we not mistaken encyclopedic information for knowledge, and created great masses of men who REMEMBER and REPEAT instead of men who THINK AND KNOW?
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Have we not built our Machine Age by suppressing the immortality of MAN? Alexis Carrel was so fully convinced that we had entirely forgotten MAN in the structure of our civilization that he wrote his grief into MAN THE UNKNOWN. In that book he said: "The Science of Man is the most important, and least known, of all the sciences." The entire purpose of the new University is to awaken the creative genius and cosmic powers which lie dormant in every living being.
It is about time that we give thought to the immortality of man, for world culture has been dangerously declining for the last fifty years because of lack of support and patronage to world- genius in favor producing more, and still more, war and luxury machines.
The UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY is new in name only. It has already existed for ten years in that fine old marble palace and classic sculpture gardens on a mountain top near Waynesboro, Virginia, which Calvin Coolidge once used as a summer White House.
It was founded by Lao Russell under the name of the Walter Russell Foundation in 1948. Through her dedicated leadership and inspired, untiring efforts, she has built a student body of approximately 50,000 students all over the world, who have been studying the Science of Man Course in their homes, which both the Russells have written together, in UNIVERSAL LAW, NATURAL SCIENCE AND LIVING PHILOSOPHY, - also their separately written books which give knowledge of man to man, and also give new knowledge of God's ways and processes in the creation of our universe.
The world knows Lao Russell as a higher philosopher and humanist, but she is also a gifted scientist and sculptor whose colossal marble CHRIST OF THE BLUE RIDGE, which she created with Walter Russell, inspires and illumines the many thousands who visit the mountain top paradise that she has created during her ten years of preparation for the unfolding of this university. Having arrived at this point The Walter Russell Foundation merely "grew up" into its university status.
The world also knows Dr. Walter Russell in the arts, and in
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(courtesy University of Science and Philosophy) (click to enlarge)
(courtesy University of Science and Philosophy) (click to enlarge)
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science as "The Modern Leonardo", "Dean of the Arts", "The most versatile man in America" and "The man who tapped the secrets of the universe", for he has risen to high altitudes as a painter, sculptor, author, composer of music, architect, philosopher, scientist and humanist.
Behind those ten years lies a still greater background of history covering nearly a century in time, and the greatest names in contemporary history, who gave birth to this greatest moral movement of all the centuries, which is now culminating in this new university. Herbert Spencer began it way back in the 1870's. He was deeply concerned about the ability of man to survive and progress in a social system which placed material values first, and trained men to produce material "wealth" at the cost of their Souls. He imparted these worries to his friends the poets, whom he believed to be the wisest and most illumined intellectuals in the world, such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Burroughs, Mark Twain, Henry Holt and Richard Watson Gilder, and they in turn impressed Andrew Carnegie with the necessity of building world culture by giving libraries to communities which lacked them. The greatest achievement of this initial group of Founders of the Science of Man movement was the writing of a moral code which was based upon man as the greatest product of God's Creation, and of service of man to man as man's greatest expression of unity, righteousness, good citizenship, good neighborliness and moral character.
That moral code of the poet mystics was threatened with death by inertia twenty years after its birth, through lack of leadership caused by Herbert Spencer's return to England. It was then, in 1895, that Walter Russell gave it its much needed dynamic leadership for many years of conspicuous achievement. He gathered together those poets who still lived, including Edwin Markham, who had deep fears for man, and added such other great contemporary names as Robert Collier, Alexis Carrel, Richard Le Gallienne, John Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt (Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in England) , Dr. Lee de Forest, Dan Beard, Nikola Tesla and many many other intellectuals. During
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the following fifteen years it was through Walter Russell that this powerfully spiritual group brought into being the Boy Scouts movement in England, through the efforts of Kipling's enthusiasm, and Sir Baden Powell's activities, - then the Boy Scouts of America, through Dan Beard. The Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions and other service clubs soon followed from 1905 on, until today hundreds of millions of men and youths are becoming infiltrated with the principle of brotherhood embodied in that Spencer Code, which all adopted with slight modifications of their own.
Once again the whole movement faced dissolution because of the long German war, but God would not let it die. Thomas Watson so sincerely felt the need of it when he came to New York as the head of International Business Machines, that he made it financially strong in order that it may continue, and spiritually strong by his own magnetic personality. He became its president, and many more great names of the higher intellectuals were added. With that greater strength he turned back the leadership to Walter Russell who again held the Presidency for seven years of continued reforms and cultural achievement of great value to mankind. Noteworthy among these were the sponsoring of the Bronx River Parkway by awarding its engineers with gold medals of honor, - sweat shop elimination - compulsory schooling - advertising censorship (headed by Adolph Ochs, owner of the New York Times) - Child Welfare (headed by Sophie Irene Loeb and financed by August Hecksher) - better banking ethics (headed by Francis Sisson of the Guaranty Trust Co.) - Better Business Bureau - the writing of MAN THE UNKNOWN by Alexis Carrel and THE DECLINE OF THE WEST by Oswold Spengler, as warnings to our civilization, which has never heeded them - and the awarding of many medals for intellectual service to man.
For twelve years Walter Russell and Thomas Watson worked together in spreading the Spencer Code of ethics and the Watsonian philosophy which grew out of it into the entire business world and raised its standards from the "let the purchaser beware" principle of 1925 to "the mutual service first" principle, in the short period of ten years. No better example of the business teachings in the IBM organization could be cited than the fol-
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lowing: This is a man age. To make a business grow begin growing men. We are all one brotherhood. We have but one thought, one creed, mutual helpfulness to each other.
Once again, however, the long continued second world war so weakened the power of this organization - then known as THE SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES - it was forced to cease its activities. Walter Russell, having divided his time between his profession and his humanist movement, to which he had also given most of his personal earnings, it became necessary to give his full time to the arts.
Once again God would not let die. In 1946 Lao Russell came into Walter Russell's life. Inspired by the necessity for the survival and perpetuation of this epochal movement, she conceived the idea of a university whose sole teachings would be The Science of Man, and for the past ten years has given of her genius, and the great stimulus of her indomitable spirit and love for humanity, the movement needed for its survival.
This briefly is the story of the University of Science and Philosophy - the first university ever to be founded whose sole purpose is the awakening of that divine spark of man's spiritual nature, that alone can give birth to a united and enduring civilization, with its desired pinnacle of peace, happiness and prosperity, which all men eternally seek.
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