Sir John Templeton, who died on 8 July at the age of 95, was one of the most modest billionaires you could hope to meet. I interviewed him once, when he was visiting England to talk to Prince Philip - in a small stuffy room at the top of a small stuffy club on Green Park, London, where he was staying because he liked it. He could have bought the Ritz next door without noticing, but that would have been extravagant. He would have thought it wrong. He was prepared to spend billions on his causes, but never a penny more than he thought was needed to get the job done. The job that needed doing, he thought, was to recognize the spiritual aspects of the world as quite as real, as reliable and as worth studying as anything else that science can examine. He would say that he wanted from his philanthropy "new spiritual information".
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