Trine, Ralph Waldo (1866-1958)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Ralph Waldo Trine was born in Mount Morris, Illinois, on 9 September 1866. He was an ethical veg*n and advocated for animal welfare. Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Christian socialism, Trine was known as a proponent of the New Thought movement described by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as "an optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power." James continues, "One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England Transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind."

Trine was the director of both the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (founded in 1868) and the American Humane Education Society (established 1889). In his best-known book, Every Living Creature (1899), Trine spells out his ethical veg*nism and his advocacy for animal welfare. He purchased and lived on a fruit farm in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife Grace Hyde Trine, before moving to California where he died, on 22 February 1958.

 

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