"The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time"

[fiefoe]

A whirlwind tour of the traditional Western canon, circa the age of Eugenics. I thought that 排比句 is a Chinese thing, but Will Durant evidently loves using this rhetoric device too, in making his sonorous pronoucements.

• In the end men began to write history as if it had never been lived at all, as if no drama had ever walked through it; no comedies or tragedies of struggling or frustrated men. The vivid narratives of Gibbon and Taine gave way to ash-heaps of irrelevant erudition in which every fact was correct, documented—and dead.
• And so with every country, so with the world; its history is properly the history of its great men. What are the rest of us but willing brick and mortar in their hands, that they may make a race a little finer than ourselves? Therefore I see history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of man through genius with the obdurate inertia of matter and the baffling mystery of mind; the struggle to understand, control, and remake himself and the world.
• Perhaps Tarde and James are right, and all history is a succession of inventions made by genius and turned into conventions by the people, a series of initiatives taken by adventurous leaders and spread among the masses of mankind by the waves of imitation. There is no doubt that at the beginning and summit of every age some heroic genius stands, the voice and index of his time, the inheritor and interpreter of the past, the guide and pioneer into the future.
• Here in the Republic and the Dialogues is such a riotous play of the creative imagination as might have made a Shakespeare; here is imagery squandered with lordly abandon; here is humor such as one misses in our ponderous modern philosophers; here is no system but all systems; here is one abounding fountainhead of European thought; here is prose as strong and beautiful as the great temples where Greek joy disported itself in marble; here literary prose is born, and born adult.
• Strangely bridging these two streams of thought—the scientific and the religious—stands the figure of Spinoza: polisher of lenses and God-intoxicated man; silent devotee of lonely speculation, and formulator of the metaphysics of modern science; lover of mechanics and geometry, and martyr equally with Bruno to philosophy,
• But which of us is original except in form? What idea can we conceive today that has not enjoyed, in one garb or another, a hoary antiquity of time? It is easier to be original in error than in truth, for every truth displaces a thousand falsehoods... Did not Spinoza, profoundest of modern thinkers, take the essentials of his thought from Bruno, Maimonides, and Descartes? Did not Ramus defend, as his thesis for the doctorate, the modest proposition that everything in Aristotle is false except that which he pilfered from Plato? And did not Plato, like Shakespeare, borrow lavishly from every store, making these stolen goods his own by transforming them with beauty? Granted that Voltaire, like Bacon, “lighted his candle at every man’s torch” it remains that he made the torch burn so brightly that it enlightened all mankind.
• But just as physiological decay leads to no action unless it sends its message of pain to consciousness, so the economic and political corruption of Bourbon France might have proceeded to utter national disintegration had not a hundred virile pens brought home the state of affairs to the conscience and consciousness of their country. And in that great task Voltaire was commander-in-chief;
• It seems unimportant and irrelevant that the tale as Homer tells it is not true, that his men and women—and even some of his deities—are apparently the creatures of his lordly imagination; it is so well invented, and so vivaciously recounted, that if the facts were different, so much the worse for the facts. Beauty has its rights as well as truth; and the Iliad is more important than the Trojan War.
• It is the year 415 B.C. Athens is deep in the Peloponnesian War, a war of Greek with Greek, shot through with all the ferocity of relatives.
• How are ye blind,
  Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
  Temples to desolation, and lay waste
  Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
  The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die.
  (Was it this prologue that Socrates, as story goes, applauded so long that the actor consented to repeat it?)
• this Lucretius, obviously nervous and unstable:
  No single thing abides, but all things flow.
  Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow
  Until we know and name them. By degrees
  They melt, and are no more the things we know.
  Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
  I see the suns, I see the systems lift
  Their forms; and even the systems and their suns
  Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
  Thou too,O Earth—thine empires, lands and seas—
  Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,
  Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too
  Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.
  Nothing abides.Thy seas in delicate haze
  Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
  And where they are shall other seas in turn
  Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.
• Wine of the grapes,
  Goblets of gold—
  And a pretty maid ofWu.
  She comes on pony-back; she is fifteen;
  Blue-painted eyebrows—
  Shoes of pink brocade—
  Inarticulate speech—
  But she sings bewitchingly well.
  So, feasting at the table
  Inlaid with tortoise shell,
  She gets drunk in my lap.
  Ah, child,what caresses
  Behind lily-embroidered curtains!
  ( 蒲萄酒，金叵罗，吴姬十五细马驮。
  青黛画眉红锦靴，道字不正娇唱歌。
  玳瑁筵中怀里醉，芙蓉帐底奈君何。Of all the poems he picked this one!）
• All the world knows Will Shakespeare’s story: how he married in haste and repented without leisure, how he fled to London, became an actor, revamped old plays with his own light and fire, and “did” the town with wild Kit Marlowe, believing that “all things are with more spirit chased than enjoyed” .. how he declared war against the rising Puritans, and challenged them merrily—“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
• No man had ever mastered language, or used it with such lordly abandon. Anglo-Saxon words, French words, Latin words, alehouse words, medical words, legal words; tripping monosyllabic lines and sonorous sesquipedalian speech; pretty ladylike euphuisms and rough idiomatic obscenities: only an Elizabethan could have dared to write such English. We have better manners now, and less power.
  Life is beyond criticism, and Shakespeare is more alive than life.
• sailed in Shelley’s boat, the Ariel, across the Bay of Spezzia to Leghorn, to meet the impoverished Leigh Hunt and his abounding family,
• IF I WERE RICH I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young.
• Until you have surrounded James you need not bother with such transitory psychological fashions as psychoanalysis and behaviorism, and when you have absorbed James you will be immune to these epidemics... But if you disagree with an author, or are shocked by his heresies, read on nevertheless; toleration of differences is one mark of a gentleman. Make notes of all passages that offer help toward the reconstruction of your character (not someone else’s character) or the achievement of your aims,
• so the nineteenth century was the age of theoretical biology, and the twentieth will see it in triumphant operation. New conceptions of the nature of development and man dominated the scientific scene, and precipitated a war of faiths that has unsettled and saddened the Western mind. It was a century poor in sculpture, despite the unfinished Rodin, and a century full of dubious experiments in painting, from Turner’s sunsets to Whistler’s rain, but in music, strange to say (for who could have expected it in an age of machines?), it outsang every other epoch in history.
• here is Johannes Brahms, looking like a butcher and composing like an angel,
• the pathetic Tschaikowsky, breaking his heart over a Venus of the opera, ends his life with a cup of poison (we may be sure of this, since all respectable historians deny it).
• Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief. The philosophers of our parent-century were almost as unhappy as the composers: they began with Schopenhauer, who wrote an encyclopedia of misery, and ended with Nietzsche, who loved life because it was a tragedy, but went insane with the thought that he might have to live again.
• Poe, too, is a bit overrated; ...terrible tales that appeal to our bourgeois love of mystery and our tenderfoot delight in imagined pain; we are glad to suffer by proxy.We call Poe a great artist when we only mean that his biography is interesting and his sufferings attractive to us. It is always easier to love the weak than the strong; the strong do not need our love, and instinctively we look for flaws in their irritating perfection;
• Never before had man so believed in mankind, and perhaps never again since. Search through all ancient Greek and Latin literature, and you will find no affirmatory belief in human progress. Not until the Occident brought into the Orient the virus of—the fever of—progress can you find in any Hindu or Chinese thinker any belief in the notion that man marches forward through the years.
• But it was woman who gave man agriculture and the home; she domesticated man as she domesticated the sheep and the pig. Man is woman’s last domestic animal, and perhaps he is the last creature that will be civilized by woman.
• Less than one hundred years ago our jails were dens of filth and horror, colleges for the graduation of minor criminals into major criminals; now our prisons are vacation resorts for tired murderers. We still exploit the lower strata of our working classes, but we soothe our consciences with “welfare work.” Eugenics struggles to balance with artificial selection the interference of human kindliness and benevolence with that merciless elimination of the weak and the infirm which was once the mainspring of natural selection.
• Above all, consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual, moral, and artistic heritage through which the race forms the growing individual and makes him human. Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous animals; we become human, we have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation, and transmission place mankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before.
• 1294—THE DEATH OF ROGER BACON This date is almost as good as any other to mark the first use of gunpowder, for the rebellious English monk who died in this year may be held partly responsible for its invention. It was Roger Bacon who first definitely described the explosive that would revolutionize the world and offer to all pious statesmen a substitute for birth control.
• 1492—COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA When Columbus discovered us, he put an end to the Italian Renaissance by changing trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and bringing wealth and power first to Spain, making possible Velázquez and Cervantes, Murillo and Calderon; then to England, financing Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and Hobbes; then to the Netherlands, producing Rembrandt and Spinoza, Rubens and Van Dyck, Hobbema and Vermeer; and then to France, generating Rabelais and Montaigne, Poussin and Claude Lorraine. When, in 1564, Michelangelo died and Shakespeare was born, it was a sign that the Renaissance had died in Italy and been reborn in England.