MANAS, a “weekly journal of independent inquiry,” ceased publication on December 28, 1988,
not quite 41 years after its first issue. Henry Geiger, the man who conceived the publication and
wrote almost every word of each eight-page issue, died February 15, 1989, at the age of 80.
Henry Geiger was a conscientious objector in World War II, a commercial printer, and a lecturer and
leader in The Theosophy Lodge in Los Angeles. He really meant it when he said MANAS would
present “viewpoints and ideas, not personalities.” Geiger’s technique was to quote from and reflect
on his pantheon of heroes and heroines: Plato, Gautama Buddha, Lao Tse, Gandhi, Tom Paine,
Emerson, Pico della Mirandola, Simone Weil, Jose Ortega y Gassett, Abraham Maslow, Hannah
Arendt, Thoreau, and a host of others. He considered these men and women to be eternally present
through their work, available for stimulation, inspiration, and dialogue, and above all, for the
building of one’s own philosophical stance.
There was no better companion in that process than Henry Geiger. Abraham Maslow once called him
“the only small ‘p’ philosopher America has produced in this century”‘ and a Canadian journalist who
read MANAS for six months but had never met Geiger wrote a feature column about him entitled
“Socrates Lives Again in Los Angeles.”
