Let me illustrate this point by taking Euclid's Elements of Geometry and Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Euclid requires no prior study of mathematics. His book is genuinely an introduction to geometry, and to basic arithmetic as well. The same cannot be said for Newton, because Newton uses mathematics in the solution of physical problems. The reader must be able to follow his mathematical reasoning in order to understand how it interprets his observations. Newton had mastered Euclid. His mathematical style shows how deeply he was influenced by Euclid's treatment of ratio and proportions. His book is, therefore, not readily intelligible, even to competent scientists, unless Euclid has been read before. But with Euclid as a guide, the effort to read Newton, or Galileo, ceases to be fruitless.
I am not saying that these great scientific books can be read without effort. I am saying that it they are read in an historical order, the effort is rewarded. Just as Euclid illuminates Newton and Galileo, so they in turn help to make Faraday and Einstein intelligible. The point is not limited to mathematical and scientific works. It applies to philosophical books as well. Their authors tell you what you should have read before you come to them: Dewey wants you to have read Mill and Hume; Whitehead wants you to have read Descartes and Plato.
(3) The great books are always contemporary. In contrast, the books we call
"contemporary," because they are currently popular, last only for a year or two, or ten at the most. They soon become antiquated. You probably cannot recall the names of the best sellers of the fifties. If they were recalled for you, you probably would not be interested in reading them. Especially in the field of nonfiction books, you want the latest "contemporary" product. But the great books are never outmoded by the movement of thought or the shitting winds of doctrine and opinion. On the contrary, one great book tends to intensify the significance of others about the same subject. Thus, Marx's Capital and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations illuminate each other, and so do works as far apart as Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine and the medical writings of Hippocrates and Galen.
Schopenhauer said this clearly. "Looking over a huge catalogue of new books," he said,
"one might weep at thinking that, when ten years have passed, not one of them will be heard of." His further explanation is worth following: There are at all times two literatures in progress, running side by side, but little known to each other; the one real, the other only apparent. The former grows into permanent literature; it is pursued by those who live for science or poetry; its course is sober and quiet, but extremely slow;
and it produces in Europe scarcely a dozen works in a century; these, however, are permanent. The other kind is pursued by persons who live on science and poetry. It goes at a gallop, with much noise and shouting of partisans. Every twelve-month it puts a thousand works on the market. But after a few years one asks. Where are they? Where is the glory which came so soon and made so much clamor? This kind may be called fleeting, and the other, permanent literature.
"Permanent" and "fleeting" are good words to name the persistently contemporary great books and the soon antiquated current ones.
Because they are contemporary, and should be read as such, the word "classic" must be avoided. Mark Twain, you will recall, defined a classic as "something that everybody wants to have read, and nobody wants to read." I am afraid not even that is true for most people any longer. "Classic" has come to mean an ancient and antiquated book. People regard the classics as the great has-beens, the great books of their times. "But our times are different," they say. From this point of view, the only motive for reading the classics is an historical or philological interest. It is like poking about among the somewhat moldy monuments of a past culture. The classics, thus viewed, cannot offer instruction to a modern man, except, of course, about the peculiarities of his ancestors.
But the great books are not faded glories. They are not dusty remains for scholars to investigate. They are not a record of dead civilizations. They are rather the most potent civilizing forces in the world today.
Of course, there is progress in some things. There is progress in all the utilities which man can invent to make the motions of life easier and more efficient. There is progress in social affairs, of the sort signalized by the advent of democracy in modern times. And there is progress in knowledge and the clarification of problems and ideas.
But there is not progress in everything. The fundamental human problems remain the same in all ages. Anyone who reads Plutarch and Cicero, or, if you prefer, the essays of Bacon and Montaigne, will find how constant is the preoccupation of men with happiness and justice, with virtue and truth, and even with stability and change itself.
We may succeed in accelerating the motions of life, but we cannot seem to change the routes that are available to its ends.
It is not only in moral or political matters that progress is relatively superficial. Even in theoretic knowledge, even in science and philosophy, where knowledge increases and understanding may be deepened, the advances made by every epoch are laid upon a traditional foundation. Civilization grows like an onion, layer upon layer. To understand Einstein, you must, as he tells you himself, understand Galileo and Newton. To understand Whitehead, you must, as he also tells you, know Descartes and Plato. It any contemporary books are great because they deal with fundamental matters, then all the great books are contemporary because they are involved in the same discussion.
(4) The great books are the most readable. I have said this before. It means several things. If the rules of skilled reading are somehow related to the rules of skillful writing, then these are the best-written books. If a good reader is proficient in the liberal arts, how much more so is a great writer a master of them! These books are masterpieces of liberal art. In saying this, I refer primarily to expository works. The greatest works of poetry or fiction are masterpieces of fine art. In both cases, language is mastered by the writer for the sake of the reader, whether the end be instruction or delight.
To say that the great books are most readable is to say that they will not let you down it you try to read them well. You can follow the rules of reading to your utmost ability and they, unlike poorer works, will not stop paying dividends. But it is equally true to say that there is actually more in them to read. It is not merely how they are written, but what they have to say. They have more ideas per page than most books have in their entirety. That is why you can read a great book over and over again and never exhaust its contents, and probably never read skillfully enough to master it completely. The most readable books are infinitely readable.
They are rereadable for another reason. They can be read at many different levels of understanding, as well as with a great diversity of interpretation. The most obvious examples of many levels of reading are found in such books as Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and The Odyssey. Children can read them with enjoyment, but fail to find therein all the beauty and significance which delight an adult mind.
(5) I have also said before that the great books are the
most instructive, the most enlightening. This follows, in a sense, from the tact that they are original communications, that they contain what cannot be found in other books.
Whether you ultimately agree or disagree with their doctrines, these are the primary teachers of mankind, because they have made the basic contributions to human learning and thought. Insofar as they have solved important problems, wholly or partially, the principles to be found in them are the leading principles of human knowledge. And^the conclusions their authors reached are the major achievements of human thought.
It is almost unnecessary to add that the great books are the most influential books. In the tradition of learning, they have been most discussed by readers who have also been writers. These are the books about which there are many other books. Countless and, for the most part, forgotten are the books which have been written about them —the commentaries, digests, or popularizations.
; (6) Finally, the great books deal with the persistently unsolved problems of human life.
It is not enough to say of them that they have solved important problems, in whole or in part—that is only one aspect of their achievement. There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Inquiry not only begins with wonder, but usually ends with it also.
Great minds do not, like shallower ones, despise mysteries or run away from them.
They acknowledge them honestly and try to define them by the clearest statement of ultimately imponderable alternatives. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.
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You can see now how these six criteria hang together, how they follow from and support one another. You can see why, if these are the qualifications, the exclusive society of great authors has fewer than four hundred members.
Perhaps you can also see why you should read the great books rather than books about them or books which try to distill them for you. "Some books," says Francis Bacon,
"may be read by deputy, and extracts made o£ them by others. But that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort o£ books." With respect to the others,
"distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things." The same reason which sends men to the concert hall and the art gallery should send them to the great books rather than to imperfect reproductions. The firsthand witness is always preferred to garbled hearsay. A good story can be spoiled by a bad raconteur.
The only excuse which men have ever given tor reading books about these books does not hold here any more than it would in the case of canned music or cheap replicas of painting and sculpture. They know that it is easier, as well as better, to meet the fine artist in his own work rather than in its imitations. But they believe that the great teachers cannot be met in their own works. They think they are too difficult, too far above them, and hence they console themselves with substitutes. This, as I have tried to show, is not the case. I repeat: the great books are the most readable tor anyone who knows how to read. Skill in reading is the only condition for entry into this good company.
Please do not look at the list of great books as another of those lists which men make up tor the lonely island on which they are going to be shipwrecked. You do not need the idyllic solitude, which modern men can dream of only as the benefit of disaster, in order to read the great books. If you have any leisure at all, you can use it to read in. But do not make the mistake of the businessman who devotes every energy to making his pile first, and supposes that he will know how to use his spare time when he retires. Leisure and work should be components of every week, not divisions of (he span of life.
The pursuit of learning and enlightenment through the great books can relieve the tedium of toil and the monotony of business as much as music and the other fine arts.
But the leisure must be genuinely leisure. It must be time free from the children and from television, as well as un-'pccupied by money grubbing. Not only is the widely advertised fifteen minutes a day ridiculously insufficient—would anyone interested in golf or bridge think that fifteen minutes are long enough even to warm up and get started?— but the time spent in reading must not be shared with bouncing Teddy on your knee, answering Mary's questions, or watching the cops catch the robbers.
There is one point, however, in the selection of books men make for a possible shipwreck. When they are faced with having to choose a very small number, they tend to pick the best. We forget that the total amount of leisure we can rescue from our busy lives is probably no longer than a few years on a desert island. If we realized that, we might make up a list of reading for the rest of our lives as carefully as we would for a desert island. We cannot count on eternity. The bell will ring soon enough. School will be out, and unless we have laid our plans well and followed them, we are likely to find, when reading time is over, that we might just as well have played golf or bridge, for all the good it did our minds.
The list of Great Books in the Appendix is a suggestion for those who can take the hint.
It is neither too long for the average man's leisure nor too short for those who can manage to find more time. However much of it you do, I am sure of one thing: no time will be wasted. Whether your economy be one of abundance or scarcity, you will find every item on this list a profitable investment of hours and energy.
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I said before that I was going to make smaller groupings of books according as their authors appeared to be talking about the same problems and conversing with one another. Let's begin at once. The easiest way to begin is with the themes that dominate our daily conversation. The newspapers and television will not let us forget about the world crisis and our national role in it. We talk at table and in the evening, and even during office hours, about war and peace, about democracy against the totalitarian regimes, about planned economies, about civil rights and Communism, about the next national election, and hence about the Constitution, which both parties are going to use as a platform and as a plank with which to hit the other fellow over the head.
It we do more than look at the newspapers or watch television, we may have been induced to look at the Constitution itself. It the political problems with which current books deal interest us, there is more reading for us to do in relation to them and the Constitution. These contemporary authors probably read some of the great books, and the men who wrote the Constitution certainly did. All we have to do is to follow the lead, and the trail will unwind by itself.
First, let us go to the other writings of the men who drafted the Constitution. Most obvious of all is the collection of pieces, arguing for the ratification of the Constitution, published weekly in The Independent Journal and elsewhere by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. To understand The Federalist, you should read not only the Articles of Confederation, which the Constitution was intended to supplant, but also the writings of the Federalists' major opponent on many issues, Thomas Jefferson.
George Washington, Edmund Burke, and Tom Paine ^ were other great participants in the argument. Washington saw the Constitution as in some sense the leading hope of mankind. Burke, an Englishman, supported our Revolution and attacked the one in France in 1789. And Paine's works throw light on the issues of the day and the ideologies that controlled the opponents.
These writers, because they were readers as well, lead us to the books which influenced them. They are using ideas whose more extended and disinterested exposition is to be found elsewhere. The pages of The Federalist, and the writings of Jefferson, Burke, and Paine refer us to the great political thinkers of the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries in Europe. We should read Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws, Locke's essay Concerning Civil Government, Rousseau's Social Contract. To savor the rationalism of this Age of Reason, we must also read here and there in the voluminous papers of Voltaire.
You may suppose that the laissez-faire individualism of Adam Smith also belongs in our revolutionary background, but remember that The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776. The founding fathers were influenced, in their ideas about property, agrarianism, and free trade, by John Locke and the French economists against whom Adam Smith subsequently wrote.
Our founding fathers were well read in ancient history. They drew upon the annals of Greece and Rome tor many of their political examples. They had read Plutarch's Lives and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War—the war between Sparta and Athens and their allies. They followed the fortunes of the various Greek federations for what light they might throw on the enterprise they were about to undertake. They were not only learned in history and political thought, but they went to school with the ancient orators. As a result, their political propaganda is not only magnificently turned, but amazingly effective even today. With the exception of Lincoln (who had read a few great books very well), American statesmen of a later day neither speak
nor write so well.
The trail leads further. The writers of the eighteenth century had been influenced in turn by their immediate forebears in political thought. The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and the political tracts of Spinoza deal with the same problems of government—the formation of society by contract, the justifications of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, the right of rebellion against tyranny. Locke, Spinoza, and Hobbes are, in a sense, involved in a conversation with one another. Locke and Spinoza had read Hobbes. Spinoza, moreover, had read Machiavelli's The Prince, and Locke everywhere refers to and quotes "the judicious Hooker," the Richard Hooker who wrote a book about ecclesiastical government at the end of the sixteenth century, and of whom Izaak Walton, the fisherman, wrote a life.
I mention Hooker—even though he is not in either Great Books or Gateway— because he, more than the men of a later generation, had read the ancients well, especially the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle. He had certainly read them better than Thomas Hobbes, if we can judge^by the references in the latter's work. Hooker's influence on Locke partly accounts tor the difference between Locke and Hobbes on many political questions.
Like Locke, Hooker opposed the theory of the divine right of kings. Madison and Jefferson were acquainted with his arguments. Through him, still other books entered the picture. Hooker reflected the great medieval works on political theory, especially the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who was an upholder of popular sovereignty and the natural rights of man.
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