The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

To formulate a ranking system and then apply it to such a broad array of human achievement is a difficult undertaking, to be sure, but Durant (as always) succeeds brilliantly; he not only presents compelling evidence for his selections, but also stimulates the reader to form his or her own opinions and to look beyond immediate surroundings and present culture and into a timeless realm, which he called “The Country of the Mind,” a sort of cerebral retirement home wherein the heroes of our species dwell after having served their time and purpose in their respective eras and where to be human is something to be lauded. Indeed, the title of the first chapter of this book serves to frame its very thesis: “A Shameless Worship of Heroes.”

The philosophy that resonates from the pages of all of Durant’s books, but most particularly in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, is unabashedly “prohuman” and serves to underscore the splendor of our intellectual and artistic heritage. In fact, Durant was known as the “gentle philosopher” and the “radical saint,” as he always sought to report on the positive achievements in human events and history. In a sentence, Durant chose to illuminate with his pen the mountain peaks of greatness in our species’ history.

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time is a book containing the absolute best of our heritage passed on for the edification and benefit of future generations, replete with Durant’s renowned erudition, wit, and unique ability to explain the profoundest of events and ideas in simple and exciting terms. It is a book that serves both as a wonderful introduction to the writings of Will Durant and as a summing up, a quantification of genius, a travel guide to the “must-see” stops in the landscape of human history.

In many respects this book is a wonderful and logical companion volume to Durant’s Heroes of History. Most notably, whereas Heroes of History is an overview of over one hundred centuries of human achievement, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time provides Durant’s personal assessment of it. Moreover, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time contains profiles of three individuals (Darwin, Keats, and Whitman) that had been intended for inclusion in the Heroes of History book, but owing to a series of personal calamities, culminating in Durant’s death in 1981, were omitted from the text (indeed, the intended final two chapters of Heroes—Durant’s last book—would never be composed).

Through prose that rises at times to the heights of poetry, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time is an extension of Durant’s long-standing invitation to enter the world of the “best of the best,” and a means by which one can come to recognize and befriend genius. The dividends from such an enterprise are many, for as Durant once noted:

We cannot live long in that celestial realm of all genius without becoming a little finer than we were.And though we shall not find there the poignant delirium of youth,we shall know a lasting, gentle happiness, a profound delight which time cannot take from us until it takes all.

—John Little

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.