and because each one means more or less the same thing to everyone. Looking them up in the dictionary or encyclopedia is not a major problem. But an idea is a misty, vague object that takes on protean shapes, never the same for any two people. There is a strong family resemblance between the dictionaries of Dr. Johnson, Mr. Webster, and Messrs. Funk & Wagnalls, but every man makes his own Syntopicon, God forbid, and this one is Dr. Adler’s, not mine or yours. To him, of course, ideas seem to be as objective and distinct as marbles, which can be arranged in definite, logical patterns. He has the classifying mind, which is invaluable for writing a natural history or collecting stamps. Assuming that an index of ideas should be attempted at all, it should have been brief and simple, without pretensions to either completeness or logical structure—a mere convenience for the reader who wants to compare, say, Plato, Pascal, Dr. Johnson, and Freud on love. Instead, we have a fantastically elaborate index whose fatal defect is just what Dr. Adler thinks is its chief virtue: its systematic all-inclusiveness. (He apologizes because it is not inclusive enough: “It is certainly not claimed for the references under the 3,000 topics that they constitute a full collection of the relevant passages in the great books. But the effort to check errors of omission was diligent enough to permit the claim that the references under each topic constitute an adequate representation of what the great books say on that subject.”) This approach is wrong theoretically because the only one of the authors who wrote with Dr. Adler’s 2,987 topics in mind was Dr. Adler. And it is wrong practically because the reader’s mental compartmentation doesn’t correspond to Dr. Adler’s, either. Furthermore, one needs the patience of Job and the leisure of Sardanapalus to plow through the plethora of references. Those under Science, which take up twelve and a half pages, begin with four lines of references to Plato, which took me an hour to look up and read. Sometimes, as when one finds sixty-two references to one author (Aquinas) under one subdivision of one topic under one idea (God), one has the feeling of being caught in a Rube Goldberg contraption. Again, under “Justice 2. The precepts of justice: doing good, harming no one, rendering to each his own, treating equals equally,” one is referred to “Chaucer, 225a-232a, esp. 231b-232a,” which turns out to be the entire “Reeve’s Tale,” a bit of low comedy that one of the mail clerks threw into this pigeonhole apparently because Chaucer stuck on a five-line moral at the end (“esp. 231b-232a”). The one method of classification that would have been useful was not employed; there is no attempt to distinguish between major and minor references. An important discussion of Justice in Plato has no more weight than an aside by Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, although it is common practice to make such a distinction by using different type faces or by putting the major references first.
“What the Corpus Juris does for the legal profession,” Dr. Adler has said, “the Syntopicon will do for everyone.” That is, as lawyers follow a single point of law through a series of cases, the reader can follow one topic through the Great Books. The Doctor is simply carrying on his mistaken analogy with the dictionary. The structure of law, although intricate, is a rigid framework within which concepts are so classified and defined that they mean exactly the same thing to everybody. Yet Dr. Adler actually suggests that the best way for the beginning reader, wholly unfamiliar with the Great Books, to get acquainted with them is to follow chosen topics through a series of works whose context he knows nothing about.
It is natural for Dr. Adler to compare his Syntopicon with the Corpus Juris, since he has been a teacher of the philosophy of law and a writer about it, and his mind is essentially a legalistic one. He aspires to be the great codifier and systematizer of Western culture, to write its Code Napoléon. The Syntopicon is merely the first step