The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

We need not fret, then, about the future. We are weary with too much war, and in our lassitude of mind we listen readily to a Spengler announcing the downfall of the Western world. But this learned arrangement of the birth and death of civilizations in even cycles is a trifle too precise; we may be sure that the future will play wild pranks with this mathematical despair. There have been wars before, and Man and civilization survived them; within fifteen years after Waterloo, defeated France was producing so many geniuses that every attic in Paris was occupied. Never was our heritage of civilization and culture so secure, and never was it half so rich. We may do our little share to augment it and transmit it, confident that time will wear away chiefly the dross of it, and that what is finally fair and worthy in it will be preserved, to illuminate many generations.

CHAPTER SIX

Twelve Vital Dates in World History

THE IDEA OF CREATING a list of twelve vital dates in history came to me at Manila as I was preparing to set sail across the Pacific to America. It came at an appropriate moment, for it found me struggling with the problem of dates in working on the first volume of The Story of Civilization.

It was already quite clear to me that the inclusion of dates in the text would make the story as accurate and dull as a good encyclopedia; that the transformation of dead data into living narrative would require some other disposition of dates than one that would infest with them every page of the tale. The arrangement arrived at, after much pseudopodial trial and error, was to confine all dates to the margin and the notes. Perhaps some such plan would alleviate the pain inflicted by some of the textbooks of history used in our colleges and schools.

I had occasion, some years back, to examine the texts employed in certain institutions of lower learning in my neighborhood. The geography, which might have been made one of the most fascinating studies of all, was especially abominable; a mere massing of dead information, much of it made false or worthless by the war,much of it restricted to the superficial features of a nation’s life, much of it made ridiculous by provincial prejudice against the Orient. But the textbook of history—Bear and Bagley’s History of the American People—was intelligently and intelligibly written, recording the progress of civilization, as well as the logic-chopping vicissitudes of politics, and presenting its sound scholarship with pleasing artistry. It is a splendid volume.

In many high schools I have found, as the standard historical text of world history, Breasted’s Ancient Times, which I regard as the finest schoolbook in America, and along with it, only slightly inferior to it, the books of Robinson and Beard on modern European history. In these volumes there is no excessive use of dates, and if we are to agree that dates have been overdone, we shall have to acknowledge, also, that some of our texts have avoided this fault, and many of them represent a great improvement on the class books of our younger days.

I should hardly be content to have my pupils know only twelve dates, and I presume that the choice of this baker’s number would not suggest an optimum, but rather a minimum—dates, let us say, that every baker should know. How many dates a man should carry with him will depend, of course, on his functions and purposes. A farmer might do his job very well, and bring up a fine family, with no other date in his head than that of the next state fair, but a man condemned to the intellectual life, precluded from the deepening contacts of experiment and action, ought to have sufficient knowledge of man’s chronology to give him, as some poor substitute for wide personal experience, that historical perspective which is one road to philosophy and understanding.

Such a man should be able to name the century (though not necessarily the precise dates) of world-transforming inventions and discoveries like gunpowder, printing, the steam engine, electricity, and the discovery of America. He should know the centuries of the world’s greatest statesmen—say Hammurabi, Moses, Darius I, Solon, Pericles, Alexander, Caesar, Charles V, Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Disraeli, Gladstone, Bismarck, Cavour, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Lincoln; of the world’s greatest scientists and philosophers—say Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Darwin; of the world’s greatest saints—say lknaton, Lao-tzu, Isaiah, Buddha, Christ, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Loyola, Luther, and Gandhi.