Manly Palmer Hall  (March 18, 1901 – August 29, 1990) was a Canadian-born scholar and philosopher. He is perhaps most famous for his 1928 book The Secret Teachings of All Ages.

Manly P. Hall, the Philosophical Research Society’s first president, was a seeker and lover of wisdom, the very definition of a philosopher. He had the courage and the raw intellectual energy to look for wisdom in places most men had long since forgotten about, or never knew existed. He lived in an era when most Americans did not look toward other cultures and traditions, without looking down. 

Manly P. Hall began his public career in the related fields of philosophy and comparative religion at the age of nineteen, was ordained to the ministry in his twenty-second year, and devoted his life to teaching, writing, and lecturing without interruption for over half a decade. Uniquely endowed for the task to which he dedicated his life, he attained an amazing degree of scholarship in those branches of learning which bear upon the beliefs, ideals, and convictions of mankind.

Mr. Hall gave nearly seven thousand different lectures and talks, and appeared on numerous radio and television stations throughout the Unites States. All his lectures, many lasting two hours, were given extemporaneously and without notes. His versatility was incredible. He may have discussed the Bill of Rights at the dedication of a public school, explained Socratic philosophy on the campus of a university, taken the pulpit of some denominational church, given a sermon on Buddhism in a Buddhist temple, addressed the congregation of a synagogue, given the graduation talk for a medical college, or analyzed the implications of space conquest before a Chamber of Commerce. In 1940, he received the Award of Merit for lectures given at the New York World’s Fair