The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

A Shameless Worship of Heroes

Will Durant begins this book with what he calls a confession, but it reads more like a dare. In an age that loves to take down its great men, that prefers to remember Caesar as a numbskull and Napoleon as a fool — H. G. Wells's verdicts, both of them — Durant announces that he intends to do the opposite. He will worship heroes, shamelessly, and he will spend the rest of the book naming them.

This is not nostalgia. Durant lived through the period that invented the modern habit of leveling. Marxists told him history was made by classes, not people. Spencerian sociologists told him it was made by impersonal forces. Wells told him the great men were mostly clowns who got lucky. And Durant, who had read more history than almost anyone alive, looked at the evidence and concluded that the materialists had it backwards. The history of France, he writes, is not the history of its prices and wages. It is the record of its inventors, scientists, statesmen, poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, and saints. The rest of us are willing brick and mortar in their hands.

That is the argument the book has to make, and Durant makes it the only way he knows how — by introducing us, one by one, to the brick-and-mortar minds that built the modern world. He calls the place they live "the Country of the Mind." It is the realm where the geniuses go on speaking after they have died, and where any reader with seven hours a week can walk in and be educated by them. Durant believed that promise literally. He told audiences across America that he could turn them into philosophers if they would just sit down with the right hundred books. He was the most optimistic teacher of the twentieth century, and his optimism rested on a single conviction: that we are not equal to the great minds, but that we are not cut off from them either. We can learn from them. We can be made finer by them. That is what civilization is for.