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By Root 1032 0

fairly obvious, though offering plenty of room for discussion: Herodotus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Montesquieu, Boswell, Mill, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Freud. The rest of the list depended entirely upon the Board, and in this case the choice seems to be mostly foolish. Only two selections are both daring and sound: Moby-Dick and William James’ Psychology. The former is, of course, well known but could easily have been passed over; the latter is an extraordinarily rich and imaginative work that has been overshadowed by the Freudian vogue. The Freud volume, with no less than eighteen books and papers in it, gives an excellent conspectus of Freud’s work; the Marx volume, on the other hand, contains only the Communist Manifesto and Volume I of Capital (misleadingly titled, so that it suggests it is the whole work), which is barely the ABC of Marx’s political thought. This unevenness of editing is prevalent. There is a provincial overemphasis on English literature at the expense of French; we get Boswell, Gulliver, Tristram Shandy, and Tom Jones but no Molière, Corneille, or Racine, and no Stendhal, Balzac, or Flaubert. This is what might be called an accidental eccentricity, the kind of error any board of fallible mortals might make. But most of the eccentricities are systematic rather than accidental, springing from dogma rather than oversight.

A fifth of the volumes are all but impenetrable to the lay reader, or at least to this lay reader—the four devoted to Aristotle and Aquinas and the six of scientific treatises, ranging from Hippocrates to Faraday. “There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader,” airily writes Dr. Hutchins. “He can never fully comprehend it. That is why the books in this set are infinitely rereadable.” I found these ten volumes infinitely unreadable. There is a difference between not fully comprehending Homer and Shakespeare (in that one is always discovering something new on rereading them) and not even getting to first base with either a writer’s terminology or what he is driving at. Aristotle and Aquinas should have been included, I would say, but four volumes is excessive. Furthermore, no expository apparatus is provided, no introduction relating their Weltanschauung to our own, no notes on their very special use of terms and their concepts. Lacking such help, how can one be expected to take an interest in such problems, vivid enough to Aquinas, as “Whether an Inferior Angel Speaks to a Superior Angel?,” “Whether We Should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?,” “Whether Heavenly Bodies Can Act on Demons?,” and “Whether by Virtue of Its Subtlety a Glorified Body Will No Longer Need to Be in a Place Equal to Itself?” In fact, even with help, one’s interest might remain moderate. In the case of a philosopher like Plato, essentially a literary man and so speaking a universal human language, the difficulty is far less acute, but Aquinas and Aristotle were engineers and technicians of philosophy, essentially system builders whose concepts and terminology are no longer familiar.

The difficulty is much more urgent in the six volumes of scientific work, so urgent that almost no expository apparatus would suffice. A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work (the three other categories into which the editors sort the Great Books) partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist (equations, diagrams, and so on) and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science, since it has often been revised, edited, and even superseded by the work of later scientists. Milton, on the other hand, does not supersede Homer; Gibbon represents no advance over Thucydides. All this is pretty obvious, but in this one instance, the editors of the Great Books exhibit a remarkable capacity for overlooking the obvious. Their dogma states that all major cultural achievements are of