The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Will Durant

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781439107140
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A wise and witty compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatest minds, and greatest books of all time—listed in accessible and succinct form—by one of the world's greatest scholars. From the "Hundred Best Books" to the "Ten Greatest Thinkers" to the "Ten Greatest Poets, " here is a concise collection of the world's most significant knowledge. For the better part of a century, Will Durant dwelled upon—and wrote about—the most significant eras, individuals, and achievements of human history. His selections have finally been brought together in a single, compact volume. Durant eloquently defends his choices of the greatest minds and ideas, but he also stimulates readers into forming their own opinions, encouraging them to shed their surroundings and biases and enter "The Country of the Mind, " a timeless realm where the heroes of our species dwell.From a thinker who always chose to exalt the positive in the human species, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time stays true to Durant's optimism. This is a book containing the absolute best of our heritage, passed on for the benefit of future generations. Filled with Durant's renowned wit, knowledge, and unique ability to explain events and ideas in simple and exciting terms, this is a pocket-size liberal arts and humanist curriculum in one volume.

CHAPTER ONE
A Shameless Worship of Heroes

OF THE MANY IDEALS which in youth gave life a meaning and radiance missing from the chilly perspectives of middle age, one at least has remained with me as bright and satisfying as ever before—the shameless worship of heroes. In an age that would level everything and reverence nothing, I take my stand with Victorian Carlyle, and light my candles, like Mirandola before Plato’s image, at the shrines of great men.

I say shameless, for I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If we may believe historian H. G.Wells, Caesar was a numbskull and Napoleon a fool. Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth. In some of us, perhaps, it is a noble and merciless asceticism, which would root out of our hearts the last vestige of worship and adoration, lest the old gods should return and terrify us again.

For my part, I cling to this final religion, and discover in it a content and stimulus more lasting than came from the devotional ecstasies of youth. How natural it seemed to greet the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore by that title which so long had been given him by his countrymen, Gurudeva (“Revered Master”)—for why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountaintops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all: a man who is both great and good? So many of us are mere talents, clever children in the play of life, that when genius stands in our presence we can only bow down before it as an act of God, a continuance of creation. Such men are the very life-blood of history, to which politics and industry are but frame and bones.

Part cause of the dry scholasticism from which we were suffering when James Harvey Robinson summoned us to humanize our knowledge was the conception of history as an impersonal flow of figures and “facts,” in which genius played so inessential a role that histories prided themselves upon ignoring them. It was to Karl Marx above all that this theory of history was due; it was bound up with a view of life that distrusted the exceptional man, envied superior talent, and exalted the humble as the inheritors of the earth. In the end men began to write history as if it had never been lived at all, as if no drama had ever walked through it; no comedies or tragedies of struggling or frustrated men. The vivid narratives of Gibbon and Taine gave way to ash-heaps of irrelevant erudition in which every fact was correct, documented—and dead.

No, the real history of man is not in prices and wages, nor in elections and battles, nor in the even tenor of the common man; it is in the lasting contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture. The history of France is not, if one may say it with all courtesy, the history of the French people; the history of those nameless men and women who tilled the soil, cobbled the shoes, cut the cloth, and peddled the goods (for these things have been done everywhere and always)—the history of France is the record of her exceptional men and women, her inventors, scientists, statesmen, poets, artists,musicians, philosophers, and saints, and of the additions which they made to the technology and wisdom, the artistry and decency, of their people and mankind. And so with every country, so with the world; its history is properly the history of its great men. What are the rest of us but willing brick and mortar in their hands, that they may make a race a little finer than ourselves? Therefore I see history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of man through genius with the obdurate inertia of matter and the baffling mystery of mind; the struggle to understand, control, and remake himself and the world.

I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead; men carving marble into forms ennobling men; men molding peoples into better instruments of greatness; men making a language of music and music out of lan-guage; men dreaming of finer lives-and living them. Here is a process of creation more vivid than in any myth; a godliness more real than in any creed.

To contemplate such men, to insinuate ourselves through study into some modest discipleship to them, to watch them at their work and warm ourselves at the fire that consumes them, this is to recapture some of the thrill that youth gave us when we thought, at the altar or in the confessional, that we were touching or hearing God. In that dreamy youth we believed that life was evil, and that only death could usher us into paradise.We were wrong; even now, while we live, we may enter it. Every great book, every work of revealing art, every record of a devoted life is a call and an open sesame to the Elysian Fields. Too soon we extinguished the flame of our hope and our reverence.

Let us change the icons, and light the candles again.

CHAPTER TWO
The Ten “Greatest” Thinkers

WHAT IS THOUGHT? It baffles description because it includes everything through which it might be defined. It is the most immediate fact that we know, and the last mystery of our being. All other things come to us as its forms, and all human achievements find in it their source and their goal. Its appearance is the great turning point in the drama of evolution.

When did the miracle begin? Perhaps when the great surges of ice came down relentlessly from the Pole, chilling the air, destroying vegetation almost everywhere, eliminating countless species of helpless and unadaptable animals, and pushing a few survivors into a narrow tropical belt, where for generations they clung to the equator, waiting for the wrath of the North to melt. Probably it was in those critical days, when all the old and wonted ways of life were nullified by the invading ice, and inherited or traditional patterns of behavior found no success in an environment where everything was altered, that animals with comparatively complete but inflexible instinctive equipment were weeded out because they could not change within to meet the change outside; while the animal we call man, dowered with a precarious plasticity, learned and rose to an unquestioned supremacy over all the species of the forest and the field.

It was on some such life-and-death emergency as this, presumably, that human reasoning began. That same incompleteness and adaptability of native reactions which we see today in the infant, which makes it so inferior to a newborn animal but leaves it in recompense the possibility of learning—that same plasticity saved man and the higher mammals; while powerful organisms like the mammoth and the mastodon, that had prowled about hitherto supreme, succumbed to the icy change and became mere sport for paleontological curiosity. They shivered and passed away, while man, puny man, remained. Thought and invention began: the bewilderment of baffled instinct begot the first timid hypotheses, the first tentative putting together of two and two, the first generalizations, the first painful studies of similarities of quality and regularities of sequence, the first adaptation of things learned to situations so novel that reactions instinctive and immediate broke down in utter failure. It was then that certain instincts of action evolved into modes of thought and instruments of intelligence: what had been watchful waiting or stalking a prey became attention; fear and flight became caution and deliberation; pugnacity and assault became curiosity and analysis; manipulation became experiment. The animal stood up erect and became man, slave still to a thousand circumstances, timidly brave before countless perils, but in his precarious way destined henceforth to be lord of the earth.

The Adventure of Human Reason

From that obscure age to our own place and time the history of civilization has been the adventure of human reason. At every step on the stairway of progress it was thought that lifted us, slowly and tentatively, to a larger power and a higher life. If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas. Certainly it is desire, the restlessness of our insatiable wants, that agitates us into thinking; but however motivated or inspired, it is thought that finds a way. We need not settle then the ancient dispute between those hero-worshipers, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, who interpret history in terms of great men, and those hero-scorners who, like Spencer and Marx, see only economic causes behind historical events; we may be sure that no pressure of economic circumstance would ever have sufficed to advance mankind if the illuminating spark of thought had not intervened.

Perhaps Tarde and James are right, and all history is a succession of inventions made by genius and turned into conventions by the people, a series of initiatives taken by adventurous leaders and spread among the masses of mankind by the waves of imitation. There is no doubt that at the beginning and summit of every age some heroic genius stands, the voice and index of his time, the inheritor and interpreter of the past, the guide and pioneer into the future. If we could find in each epoch of unfolding civilization the representative and dominating figure in its thought, we should have a living panorama of our history. But as we face the task of selecting these persons of the drama, about whom the play revolves, a dozen difficulties daunt us. What shall be our test of greatness? How, in the roster of human genius, shall we know whom to omit and whom to name?

The Criteria

Well, we shall be ruthless and dogmatic here; and though it break our hearts we shall admit no hero to our list whose thought, however subtle or profound, has not had an enduring influence upon mankind. This must be our supreme test. We shall try to take account of the originality and scope, the veracity and depth, of each thinker’s thought; but what we must bear in mind above all is the extent and persistence of his influence upon the lives and minds of men. Only so can we control in some measure our personal prejudices, and arrive at some moderate impartiality in our choice.

And now how shall we define a “thinker”? Presumably the word will embrace philosophers and scientists—but only these? Shall we include men like Euripides, or Lucretius, or Dante, or Leonardo, or Shakespeare, or Goethe? No; we shall bow humbly to such great names and class them, despite the reach and fathom of their thought, as only secondarily thinkers, as artists first and above all. Shall we include such immensely influential leaders as Jesus, or Buddha, or Augustine, or Luther? No; these founders and renewers of religion would overlap our term; it was not thought or reason, but feeling and noble passion, a mystic vision and an incorrigible faith that made them, from their little foot of earth, move the world. Shall we admit into our council of ten those great men of action whose names ring down the corridor of history—men like Pericles, or Alexander, or Caesar, or Charlemagne, or Cromwell, or Napoleon, or Lincoln? No; if we spread the word “thinker” to catch such heroes in its net we shall deprive it of its distinctive meaning, and shall fail to catch the significance of thought. We must embrace within it philosophers and scientists alone.We shall seek for those men who by their thinking, rather than by their action or their passion, have most influenced mankind.We shall search for them in the quiet places of the world, far from the madding crowd; in those obscure corners where great thoughts came to them “as on dove’s feet,” and where for a moment they saw, as in a transfiguration, the countenance of truth. Who then shall be first?

1. CONFUCIUS At once our doubts and quarrels begin. By what canon shall we include Confucius and omit Buddha and Christ? By this alone: that he was a moral philosopher rather than a preacher of religious faith; that his call to the noble life was based upon secular motives rather than upon supernatural considerations; that he far more resembles Socrates than Jesus.

Born (552 B.C.) in an age of confusion, in which the old power and glory of China had passed into feudal disintegration and factional strife, Kung-fu-tse undertook to restore health and order to his country. How? Let him speak:

The illustrious ancients,when they wished to make clear and to propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such investigation of knowledge lay in the investigation of things, and in seeing them as they really were. When things were thus investigated, knowledge became complete. When knowledge was complete, their thoughts became sincere. When their thoughts were sincere, their souls became perfect.When their souls were perfect, their own selves became cultivated.When their selves were cultivated, their families became regulated.When their families were regulated, their states came to be put into proper order.When their states were in proper order, then the whole world became peaceful and happy.

Here is a sound moral and political philosophy within the compass of a paragraph. It was a highly conservative system; it exalted manners and etiquette, and scorned democracy; despite its clear enunciation of the Golden Rule it was nearer to Stoicism than to Christianity. A pupil having asked him should one return good for evil, Confucius replied: “With what then will you recompense kindness? Return good for good, and for evil, justice.” He did not believe that all men were equal; it seemed to him that intelligence was not a universal gift. As his pupil Mencius put it: “That whereby man differs from the lower animals is little. Most people throw it away.” The greatest fortune of a people would be to keep ignorant persons from public office, and secure their wisest men to rule them.

A great city, Chung-tu, took him at his word and made him magistrate. “A marvelous reformation,” we are told, “ensued in the manners of the people…. There was an end of crime…. Dishonesty and dissoluteness hid their heads. Loyalty and good faith became the characteristic of the men, chastity and docility of the women.” It is too good to be true, and probably it did not last very long. But even in his lifetime Confucius’ followers understood his greatness and foresaw the timeless influence he was to have in molding the courtesy and poise and placid wisdom of the Chinese. “His disciples buried him with great pomp. A multitude of them built huts near his grave and remained there, mourning as for a father, for nearly three years. When all the others were gone, Tse-Kung,” who had loved him beyond the rest, “continued by the grave for three years more, alone.”

2. PLATO And now we are faced with new problems. Whole civilizations confront us in which we can find no dominating name, no powerful secular personality voicing and forming his people with thought. It is so in India, and among the Jews, and among the nomad races of Asia Minor’s “Fertile Crescent”: we have a Buddha, an Isaiah, a Jesus, and a Mohammed, but we have no world-scientist, no world-philosopher. And in another case—perhaps the most lasting and marvelous civilization the world has ever known—we have a hundred Pharaohs, and innumerable relics of a varied art, but no name stands out as that of one who brought the past into the perspective of wisdom and stamped his influence upon the intellectual development of his nation.We have to pass respectfully by these peoples and these centuries, and consider the glory of Periclean Greece.

Why do we love Plato? Because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the intoxication of dialectical revelry, passionate seeker of the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wild nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be forgiven for whatever errors he has made.We love him because of his high passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation but for the remolding of the world. We love him because he worshiped beauty as well as truth, and gave to ideas the living movement of drama, and clothed them in all the radiance of art. Here in the Republic and the Dialogues is such a riotous play of the creative imagination as might have made a Shakespeare; here is imagery squandered with lordly abandon; here is humor such as one misses in our ponderous modern philosophers; here is no system but all systems; here is one abounding fountainhead of European thought; here is prose as strong and beautiful as the great temples where Greek joy disported itself in marble; here literary prose is born, and born adult.

Plato, then, must be our second name. But we shall have to defend him against a very reasonable challenge: What of old Socrates, almost the father, and surely the greatest martyr, of philosophy? It will seem ridiculous to omit him from a list which will include heroes not half so great as he. The reader must not be shocked to learn that Socrates is half a myth, and only half a man. A learned Frenchman, M. Dupreel (in La Legende Socratique), has reduced the noble gadfly to the misty historical status of Achilles, Oedipus, Romulus, and Siegfried. No doubt when we are dead some careful and conscientious scholar will prove that we never existed. But we may be certain that in good measure Socrates owes his fame as a philosopher to the creative imagination of Plato, who used the magnificent idler as the mouthpiece of his views.How much of Plato’s Socrates was Socrates, and how much of it was Plato, we shall probably never know. Let us take Plato as implying both.

His Dialogues are among the precious possessions of mankind. Here for the first time philosophy took form, and by the very exuberance of youth achieved a perfection unrivaled in after days. Do you wish to hear noble discourse of love and friendship?—read the Lysis, the Charmides, and the Phaedrus. Would you know what a great and tender soul—the Platonic Socrates—thought of another life?—read the Phaedo, whose final pages are one of the peaks in the history of prose. Are you interested in the puzzles of the mind, in the mystery of knowledge?—read the Parmenides and the Theaetetus. Are you interested in anything?—read the Republic: here you shall find metaphysics, theology, ethics, psychology, theory of education, theory of statesmanship, theory of art; here you shall find feminism and birth-control, communism and socialism with all their virtues and their difficulties, eugenics and libertarian education, aristocracy and democracy, vitalism and psychoanalysis—what shall you not find here? No wonder Emerson awarded to the Republic the words which the occasionally pious Omar had written of the Koran: “Burn the libraries, for their value is in this book.”

As to Plato’s influence, how can we doubt? Consider the Academy which he founded, the first and longest-lived of the universities of the world. Consider the perpetual revival of Plato’s philosophy from the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria to the Cambridge Platonists of England. Consider the permeation of Christian theology with Platonic thought and symbolism, and the dominance of Plato in the culture of the earlier Middle Ages. Consider the enthusiastic Platonism of the Renaissance, when Lorenzo’s table recaptured some of the glory of the Symposium, and Pico della Mirandola burned candles devoutly before the Master’s image. Consider that at this moment, in a hundred countries and a thousand cities, a hundred thousand students, young and old, are absorbed in the Republic or the Dialogues, are being slowly and gratefully molded into a sensitive wisdom by the ardor...