Early Life and Work
Andrews was born in Templeton, Massachusetts on March 22, 1812, "the youngest of eight children of the Reverend Elisha Andrews and his wife, Ann Lathrop." He grew up thirty-five miles northeast in Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Andrews went to Louisiana at age 19 and studied and practiced law there. Appalled by slavery, he became an abolitionist. He was the first counsel of Mrs. Myra Clark Gaines in her celebrated suits. Having moved to Texas in 1839, Andrews and his family were almost killed because of his abolitionist lectures and had to flee in 1843. Andrews travelled to England where he was unsuccessful at raising funds for the abolitionist movement back in America.
While in England, Andrews became interested in Pitman's new shorthand writing system and upon his return to the U.S. he taught and wrote about the shorthand writing system, and devised a popular system of phonographic reporting. To further this he published a series of instruction books and edited two journals, the Anglo-Saxon and the Propagandist. He devised a "scientific" language, "Alwato," in which he was wont to converse and correspond with pupils. At the time of his death Andrews was compiling a dictionary of Alwato, which was published posthumously. A remarkable linguist, he also became interested in phonetics and the study of foreign languages, eventually teaching himself "no fewer than 32" languages.
By the end of the 1840s he began to focus his energies on utopian communities. Fellow individualist anarchist Josiah Warren was responsible for Andrew's conversion to radical individualism, and in 1851 they established Modern Times in Brentwood, NY. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846. In 1857 Andrews established Unity Home in New York City. By the 1860s he was propounding an ideal society called Pantarchy, and from this he moved on to a philosophy he called "universology", which stressed the unity of all knowledge and activities. He was also "among the first Americans to discover Marx and the first to publish his Communist Manifesto in the U.S."
Andrews was one of the first to use the word "scientology". The word is defined as a neologism in his 1871 book The Primary Synopsis of Universology and Alwato: The New Scientific Universal Language. In the 1870s Andrews promoted Joseph Rodes Buchanan's Psychometry besides his own Universology predicting that a priori derived knowledge would supersede empirical science as exact science. Andrews was also considered a leader in the religious movement of Spiritualism.
Read more about this topic: Stephen Pearl Andrews
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or work:
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)