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In the later decades of the 19th Century, the British philosopher, Herbert Spencer, took an honest look at world trends and predicted that civilization was on a downward spiral. He believed that politicians were not likely or able to change the trends and felt that the poets, visionary thinkers and artists of the world would have the solution. In England, he inspired men such as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Darwin to consider the problem. In America, his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Howard Bridge, Richard Watson Gilder, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Henry Holt, John Burroughs, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie took up the question. These men, searching for a way in which to change the negative direction of society to positive action, formed a gathering, calling themselves the Twilight Club, because they met at twilight-not simply the twilight of the day, but, as they saw the situation, they were meeting at the evening twilight of the 19th Century and the morning twilight of the 20th Century |