Francis Bacon
*Bacon, Francis. The New Organon and Related Writings (1960).

Loren Eiseley
*Eiseley, Loren. The Man Who Saw Through Time—Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma (1961). Bacon, in my view, was the principal templater of the modern period.

*Here’s an interesting Bacon quotation relating to evolution: "The transmutation of species is, in the vulgar philosophy, pronounced impossible, and certainly it is a thing of difficulty, and requireth deep search into nature; but seeing there appear some manifest instances of it, the opinion of impossibility is to be rejected, and the means thereof to be found." (80)

Buckminster Fuller
*One of the chief templaters of the contemporary period, or rather, I should say, the future, as his brilliant philosophical and scientific works have not yet been assimilated by the academic establishment. He regarded his last book, Cosmography, as his most important. This work contains a proof that "syntropy" is twice as powerful as "entropy." Read as much Fuller as you can. He’ll be regarded by the future as one of the greatest geniuses of the latter part of the twentieth century.

John Green
*Green, John C. Darwin and the Modern World View (1963).

*See especially the chapter titled "Darwin and Social Science," which contains very interesting remarks on Spencer, such as: "Nine years before Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared, Herbert Spencer made population pressure, struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest the key concepts in a theory of social evolution." Unlike Darwin, Spencer was not chained to Malthusian pessimism. He believed the harsh conditions of life would "select," as fittest, the people with the greatest ingenuity and capacity for voluntary co-operation.

Thomas Kuhn
*Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition (1970).

Thomas Paine
*A principal templater of the modern period. (See “Henry Weaver” below). If you have not yet read his The Rights of Man, please do … soon.

Giambattista Vico
*The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, tr. Fisch and Bergin (1944). I recognize Vico as the founder of the science of templatology.

Veblen, Thorstein
*Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

Henry Weaver
*Weaver, Henry G. The Mainspring of Human Progress (1947). A classic work on the American system template, containing much that is debatable and much that is very valuable, such as remarks on Paine: "George Washington declared that Thomas Paine was worth more than his entire army. This plainspoken man was the leader and the spirit of the revolution. In America, England, and France, he was the greatest political influence of the century."

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