Vision In Action Our Heritage

Vision In Action and The Twilight Club

Vision In Action was established in 2003, as heir to The Twilight Club.  The Twilight Club had a venerable tradition of ethical activism and originally was founded in the late 1870s as a “Sapient Circle” of visionary thinkers from diverse disciplines.

Inspired by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, the founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Edwin Markham, and several others. Their stated purpose was that of ethical and cultural renewal of their world.

Herbert Spencer


Ralph Waldo Emerson


Walt Whitman

Mark Twain

Andrew Carnegie

Walter Russell

The Twilight Club continued to grow well into the 20th century through the work of the artist-philopsher Walter Russell, IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr., Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel, and others, involving many thousands of people.  The Twilight Club was, among other things, an inspiration for the formation of the Boy Scouts of America and England. According to a lecture by Mr. Russell in August of 1956, the Twilight Club also inspired the formation of the Rotary Club; other such organizations included the Lions and Kiwanis Club and the Better Business Bureau.

Edwin Markham

Laureate Alexis Carrel

Lao Russell

In 1949, Lao Russell, the wife of Walter Russell, established the Walter Russell Foundation, later renamed The University of Science and Philosophy, as a continuation of The Twilight Club ideals, founding the Man-Woman Equality League--a precursor to the women’s liberation movement, and the International Age-of-Character Clubs.

The Twilight Club had two distinguishing characteristics that are of vital relevance and importance if a transformational movement of any kind is to be truly successful:

1.  Vision was always united with action. The participants’ vision and action were indeed vision in action.

2. The participants were aligned without necessarily completely agreeing with one another philosophically or ideologically.  The Twilight Club was not ideology based but commitment based, not agreement based but alignment based.

In 1998, Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, integral philosopher and business consultant, identified these two distinguishing features of The Twilight Club and recognized their continuing relevance to today’s world, combined with the vital importance of The Twilight Club’s original mission for ethical and cultural renewal.

In 1999, with his partner Laara Lindo, President of The University of Science and Philosophy (The Walter Russell Foundation), Mr. Kimura revived The Twilight Club. Within four years, The Twilight Club attracted the participation of many of today’s prominent visionary thinkers from around the world as well as hundreds of interested citizens. As The Twilight Club grew, Mr. Kimura, in order to facilitate the advent of the new era, found it necessary to establish an entirely new entity in the evolving trend and context of the 21st century.  Vision In Action is that entity.