The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Do you want to know how religion began, and how it grew up from superstition to philosophy? Read Frazer’s Golden Bough; here a great scholar has brought together in one volume the lifelong researches for which the British government, honoring itself, made him a knight of the realm. Skip if you will: learn the art of seizing out of every paragraph (usually near its beginning) the “topical sentence” in which the author lays down the proposition which his paragraph hopes to prove, and if this thesis falls outside your use or interest, leap on to the next topic, or the next, until you feel that the author is talking to you. Once that knighted volume is finished, the heaviest part of your education is over; the rest will be an adventure with gods.

Why is our list henceforth historically arranged? First, because it is well to study history as it was lived and made, taking all the activities of a civilization together—economic, social, political, scientific, philosophical, religious, literary, and artistic; in this way we shall see every work of literature, philosophy, or art in its proper place, and better understand its origin and significance—perspective is all. Second, because this arrangement will let the most delightful and entertaining masterpieces alternate with ponderous instructive tomes; it will be an aid to digestion. So, after a little more of Wells, and Breasted’s perfect chapter on Egypt in that excellent history of Europe, The Human Adventure, we shall find welcome diversion in Brian Brown’s selection of bits of wisdom from Confucius, Lao-tzu, and Men-cius, and the unequaled simplicity and beauty of the Bible will atone for Faure’s dithyrambs on art and Dr. Williams’s meaty History of Science (if you cannot secure this rare and excellent work, use Dampier-Whetham’s History of Science, or Ginzburg’s The Adventure of Science). By these rough seas we come at last to the Isles of Greece.

Here is genius almost too abundant; how shall we crowd so many giants into our little list? Let us engage guides: Breasted and Wells will show us the larger monuments, Professor Bury will unravel for us the complexities of Greek politics, and Gilbert Murray will introduce us to the greatest literature ever written. And then the geniuses themselves: Herodotus with his delightful stories, not always true; Thucydides with his realistic thinking and his classic style (the famous “Funeral Oration” composed for Pericles by Thucydides is in book 11, chapter 6 ); Plutarch with biographies that will make the names in Bury live on the stage of our memories; Homer with his lilting song of gods and heroes, of Helen and Penelope; Aeschylus the mighty with his picture of Prometheus chained and unrepentant, the very symbol of genius punished for advancing the race; Sophocles with a gentle wisdom won from suffering; and “Euripides the human,” mourning the misfortunes of his enemies, and at last forgiving even the gods.

Here is the first and greatest period in European philosophy: Diogenes Laertius tells the story of Socrates the martyr and Plato the reformer, of Democritus the Laughing Philosopher and Aristotle the Encyclopedia, of Zeno the Stoic and Epicurus who was not an Epicurean. Plato speaks, and paints his perfect state; the immaculately reasonable Aristotle preaches the golden mean, and marries the richest girl in Greece.Williams takes up the tale, and tells how science replaced superstition; how Hippocrates became, after many centuries of Physicians, the “Father of Medicine” and how Archimedes solved his theorems while a soldier, symbolizing the eternal opposition of war and art, stabbed him to death. Last of all, Elie Faure lets us stand by while Pheidias, with the patience that is genius, carves figures for the Parthenon, and Praxiteles chisels Aphrodite’s perfect grace. When shall we see such an age again?