The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

This man of intellectual interests should also know the centuries of the world’s greatest poets—say Homer, the Psalmist, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Lipo, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Pushkin, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, Poe, Whitman, and Tagore; of the world’s greatest makers of music—say Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Paganini, Brahms, Tschaikowsky,Verdi,Wagner, Paderewski, and Stravinsky; and of the world’s greatest artists or works of art—say Karnak and Luxor and the Pyramids, Pheidias and Praxiteles, Wu Tao-tzu and Sesshiu and Hiroshige, Chartres and the Taj Mahal, Giotto and Dürer, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Titian and Correggio, El Greco and Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Turner and Whistler, Millet and Cezanne.

I have left out the great prose writers, lest this chapter should read like a telephone directory, or a list of radical expor-tees, or a register of “dirty foreigners.” The reader can help me by making here his own pantheon. Let him then examine his friends and himself on the centuries and work of these men (perhaps we should also add a list of great women, from Queen Hatshepsut to Madame Curie), and so rate them and himself with a new Binet-Simon test.

If, however, one is condemned to live on a mental desert island, and can take only twelve dates with him, these dates should presumably be such as to carry in their implications the essential history of mankind. About them should cluster such associations that on their docket the greater achievements of the human mind would string themselves in a concatenation of development, in an order and perspective that would clarify old knowledge and facilitate the new. Since history is varied, and all aspects of human activity in any age are bound up with the rest, many such chains of pivotal events might be composed. What follows, then, are not the twelve world dates; they are merely twelve.

1. 4241 B.C.—THE INTRODUCTION OF THE EGYPTIAN CALENDAR This date alone, the earliest definite date in history, is sufficient to cause some disturbance to fiercely orthodox souls who believe, as did Bishop Ussher, that the world was created in 4004 B.C. To accept the testimony of Egyptologists that a calendar existed on the Lower Nile 237 years before the creation of the world might serve as a fertilizing shock to any virgin mind.

The implications of that calendar are endless. Consider the development of astronomy and mathematics that must have preceded its formulation. Consider how long even then a civilization must have endured to set aside from the economic life men with leisure enough to chart the stars and capture the course of the sun. It was a very sensible calendar compared with ours: it divided the year into twelve months of thirty days each, with five intercalary days at the end for roistering. And it stands in the memory for all Egypt, for three thousand years of recorded civilization, with orderly government, security of life and property, comforts for the body, delights for the senses, and instruction for the mind. It stands for Cheops, who built the greatest of the pyramids; and Thutmose III, who built Karnak; and Iknaton, who literally sold his kingdom for a song (arousing revolution by writing a monotheistic hymn); and Cleopatra, who led Antony to ruin by the nose—if one may speak so metonymically.

2. 543 B.C.—THE DEATH OF BUDDHA No other soul, I suppose, has ever been so influential. It is not so much that several hundred million men and women profess the Buddhist religion today; in truth, Buddhism does not follow Buddha, but is a mass of legends and superstitions that have no more right to use his name than the ferocious Christianity of Calvin or Torquemada or Tennessee has to use the name of Christ. But Buddha means India, for the spirit of India lies in religion rather than in science, in contemplation rather than in action, in a fraternal gentleness rather than in the application of mathematics to artillery, or of chemistry to bombs.

Life, said Buddha, is full of suffering; it can be made bearable only by doing no injury to any living thing, and speaking no evil of any man—or woman either. Let us hope that that simple religion is what lies behind the infinite superstitions of the Hindu mind today, and let us take the date of Buddha as the beginning of a civilization that has known every vicissitude, every injustice, every slavery, and yet in the midst of it has produced geniuses and saints from Buddha and Asoka to Gandhi and Tagore.

3. 478 B.C.—THE DEATH of CONFUCIUS We must have some symbol to represent China for us—China, so gigantic in size that it calls itself “All Under Heaven,” and so old that it records the doings of its kings for the last four thousand years.