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By Root 1017 0

up than they are now. And they are all instructed in what is after all the main point, the use of that Syntopicon—“Please, gentlemen, not Syntopticon”—in which the Great Writers have at last achieved systematic fulfillment, from Aeschylus (Esskuluss) to Zeno (Zeenoh). I also wonder how many of the over 100,000 customers who have by now caved in under the pressure of Mr. Harden and his banner-bearing colleagues are doing much browsing in these upland pastures? Those nineteenth-century book-agents were persuasive fellows, too, but few of the deckled-edged sets they wedged into the family book case ever emerged again, and the limp-leather Emersons and Carlyles they placed on the sitting-room tables tended to remain there. I don’t expect answers to these rhetorical questions from the Doctors, since they didn’t reply to my 1952 critique—unless their employing Mr. Harden was a kind of answer. But I do wonder.

[1] It is certainly much sounder than the selection offered by its long-established and still active competitor, Dr. Eliot’s celebrated Five-Foot Shelf, the Harvard Classics. Half the authors on Dr. Adler’s shelf (which also measures, by chance or ineluctable destiny, five feet) appear on Dr. Eliot’s, but only eight are represented by the same works; the rest appear in extracts or in shorter works, for if Dr. Adler overdoes the complete text, Dr. Eliot goes to the opposite extreme. Among the Great Books authors whose work doesn’t appear in the Classics at all (if one ignores a few snippets) are Aristotle, Thucydides, Aquinas, Rabelais, Spinoza, Gibbon, Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Freud. On the other hand, since Dr. Eliot went in for variety above all, he did include, though often in unsatisfactory snippets, many writers omitted by Dr. Adler. No less than ten of his fifty volumes are anthologies, and while this is overdoing it, surely the Great Books would have been enriched by a few, such as one of English poetry and one of political writing since the French Revolution. Some of Dr. Eliot’s choices are as eccentric as some of Dr. Adler’s (though Eliot produced nothing as fantastic as the six volumes of scientific treatises): Robert Burns gets a whole volume, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi another, and Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast a third. But in some ways the Classics are a better buy. For one thing, they cost only half as much. And for another, there is an amateurish, crotchety, comfortable atmosphere about them that is more inviting than the ponderous professionalism of the Great Books. Moreover, while Dr. Eliot is overfond of the brief sample, the chief practical use of such collections may well be as a grab bag of miscellaneous specimens, some of which may catch the reader’s fancy and lead him to further explorations on his own. When I was a boy, I enjoyed browsing in the family set of the Classics, but browsing in the Great Books would be like browsing in Macy’s book department.

[2] Inevitably, the choice was more than a little arbitrary: to the naked eye, such rejected ideas as Fact, Faith, Sex, Thought, Value, and Woman seem as “great” as some of those included. However, the Doctor has appended to his Syntopicon those sixteen hundred small ideas, running from A Priori to Zoology via such way stations as Gluttony (see Sin), Elasticity, Distinctness, Circumcision (see God), and Daydreaming (see Desire). This Inventory relates each of these small ideas to the Great Ideas (or Great Idea) under which references pertinent to the small ideas can be found, and all one needs to find one’s way around in the Syntopicon is some sort of idea, Great or small (plus, naturally, plenty of time and determination).

[3] By 1955, three years after this was written, Dr. Adler’s Institute had spent $640,000 of the Ford Foundation’s money and had grappled with exactly one aspect of Western Thought, namely Freedom. Their musings were embodied in a two-volume work (one was a bibliography) titled Research on Freedom: Report of Dialectical Discoveries and Constructions. “The production,” I wrote in my book on the Ford Foundation,