The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Well, there are our ten. Shall we see them in one glance?

1. Confucius

2. Plato

3. Aristotle

4. Saint Thomas Aquinas

5. Copernicus

6. Sir Francis Bacon

7. Sir Isaac Newton

8. Voltaire

8. Immanuel Kant

10. Charles Darwin

Those whom we have omitted would make as fair a list: Democritus, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Abelard, Galileo, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Nietzsche. And consider the vast movements of thought which we have ignored—feminism, for example, with its great leaders from Mary Wollstonecraft to Susan Anthony; and socialism, with its roster of hopeful theorists from Diogenes and Zeno to Lassalle and Marx. It must be so; no list could exhaust the treasure of man’s heritage or equal its infinite variety. And it is well; let us have many lists and many heroes; we cannot honor them too much, or commemorate them excessively.

Here, perhaps, is the true litany of saints; these are the names that should adorn our calendars, with those that gave new beauty to the world, or counseled it to a gentler humanity.

CHAPTER THREE

The Ten “Greatest” Poets

I DARE NOT GO on till I face the question that every logician will have asked before our quest began: “What is your test of greatness in a poet?” It is a sorry dilemma. For if I select some objective test, proudly independent of my personal likings and tastes, we shall lose the zest of adventure and surprise that might come from a gay surrender to individual preference. And the only objective test is fame or influence, but this criterion, which seemed so plausible in choosing the greatest thinkers, breaks down in the presence of poets. Who could think of rating contemporary poets according to influence or repute? Who would name the kindly and melodious Longfellow as our greatest weaver of songs merely because greater numbers listen to him gladly than will accept the jaunty heresies and experiments of Whitman? No; let me not pretend to do more here than to reveal my prejudices, to record the men who, beyond all others, have brought me that strange mixture of music, emotion, imagery, and thought, which is poetry.

1. HOMER Many years ago, in Russia, I saw the origin of poetry. We had resolved to study the Russians in their homes and their natural environment, and we had settled down for a week on peasant fare and peasant boards in the isba of our guide’s family in Chernigov. On the first night of our stay the villagers looked at us with suspicion; some timid souls announced that we had come to steal their children. But on the second night they gathered outside our hut for an open-air frolic of music and dancing, and as we sat on benches or the uncut grass an old man, bearded and blind, sitting against a wall, chanted to the accompaniment of his balalaika the ancient legends of his race. It was a plaintive narrative, always ending on a minor tone that invited the leisurely continuance of the tale, like some great revolving wheel whose impetus of motion repeatedly suffices to give it another turn. And as I listened I thought I saw Homer singing to the Greeks the Fall of Troy.

In this simple and musical way, with rhythm aiding memory, man transmitted and ornamented his history before writing came. In the days of the gods, history was sublime enough for poetry; the story of human love and war, refulgent with heavenly interest from the participation of deities, lifted the accumulated narratives of many traveling bards into the epics that we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

“Homer” was probably one of the singers who chanted these commemorative songs; we give his name to all the poets who composed these tales, because we are at ease with unity, and dislike the fragmentariness of truth. Every nation’s literature begins with such epics, “vedas,” or “sagas”—Ramayanas, Mahabharatas, Nibelungenlieds, Beowulfs, or Chansons de Roland; they are as natural to a nation’s childhood as to an individual’s; they take the place of those patriotic histories in which one’s country is always right, wins every battle, and is especially beloved of God.

It seems unimportant and irrelevant that the tale as Homer tells it is not true, that his men and women—and even some of his deities—are apparently the creatures of his lordly imagination; it is so well invented, and so vivaciously recounted, that if the facts were different, so much the worse for the facts. Beauty has its rights as well as truth; and the Iliad is more important than the Trojan War. Granted that Helen was but a name or an inspiring diplomatic phrase, and that the real objective of the warring Greeks was not a lovely rake but a strategic port; nevertheless, seven Troys lie buried in the earth, while Helen is an immortal synonym of loveliness, potent still to launch a hundred thousand books upon that greatest of all oceans—ink.