12. WILLIAMS, bk. II, chs. 14-15.
41. HOFFDING, sections on the eighteenth century.
11. FAURE, vol. IV, chs. 5-6.
37. GRAY, chs. 11-12.
GROUP X. EUROPE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, chs. 22-28.
5. WELLS, chs. 38-39.
58. TAINE, Origins of Contemporary France. Vol.V, The Modern Regime, pp. 1-90.
67. LUDWIG, E., Napoleon.
68. BRANDES, G., Main Currents of 19th Century Literature. 6v.
*69. GOETHE, Faust.
70. ECKERMANN, Conversations with Goethe.
71. HEINE, Poems. Trans. Louis Untermeyer.
34. TAINE, History of English Literature, bks. IV-V.
*72. KEATS, Poems.
*73. SHELLEY, Poems.
*74. BYRON, Poems.
44. FAGUET, sections on the nineteenth century.
75. BALZAC, Père Goriot.
*76. FLAUBERT, Works. I-vol. ed. Esp. Mme. Bovary and Salambo.
77. HUGO, Les Miserables.
78. FRANCE, ANATOLE, Penguin Isle.
79. TENNYSON, Poems.
80. DICKENS, Pickwick Papers.
81. THACKERAY, Vanity Fair.
82. TURGENEV, Fathers and Children.
83. DOSTOIEVSKI, The Brothers Karamazov.
84. TOLSTOI, War and Peace.
85. IBSEN, Peer Gynt.
12. WILLIAMS, bks. III-IV.
86. DARWIN, Descent of Man.
41. HOFFDING, sections on the nineteenth century.
87. BUCKLE, Introduction to the History of Civilization in England. Esp. part I, chs. 1-5, 15.
88. SCHOPENHAUER, Works. I-Vol. ed.
89. NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
11. FAURE, vol. IV, chs. 7-8.
37. GRAY, chs. 13-17.
GROUP XI. AMERICA
*90. BEARD, C. and M., The Rise of American Civilization. 2 v.
91. POE, Poems and Tales.
92. EMERSON, Essays.
93. THOREAU, Walden.
*94. WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass.
95. LINCOLN, Letters and Speeches.
GROUP XII. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, chs. 29-30.
5. WELLS, chs. 40-41.
96. ROLLAND, R., Jean Christophe. 2 v.
*97. ELLIS, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vols. I, II, III, VI.
*98. ADAMS, H., The Education of Henry Adams.
99. BERGSON, Creative Evolution.
100. SPENGLER, O., Decline of the West. 2 v.
*Books marked with a star are recommended for purchase. Number of books starred, 27; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $90. Number of volumes in the list: 151; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $300. Time required for reading: 4 years at 7 hours per week, 10 hours per volume.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Ten “Peaks” of Human Progress
INTHE YEAR 1794 a young French aristocrat by the magnificent name of Marquis Marie Jean de Condorcet was hiding from the guillotine in a little attic room on the outskirts of Paris. There, far from any friend, lest the coming of a friend should reveal his hiding place, he wrote the most optimistic book ever penned by the hand of man, Esquisse d’un tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain (A Sketch of a Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit).
Eloquently he described the recent liberation of science from the shackles of superstition and gloried in the triumphs of Newton. “Given 100 years of liberated knowledge and universal free education,” he said, “and all social problems will, at the close of the next century, have been solved…. There is no limit to progress except the duration of the globe upon which we are placed.”
Having completed his little manuscript, Condorcet handed it to his hostess. Then, in the dark of the night, he fled to a distant village inn and flung his tired body upon a bed. When he awoke, he found himself surrounded by the police. Taking from his pocket a vial of poison which he had carried for this culminating chapter of his romance, Condorcet drank it to the last drop and then fell into the arms of his captors, dead.
I have never ceased to marvel that a man so placed—driven to the very last stand of hope, with all his personal sacrifices of aristocratic privilege and fortune gone for nothing, with that great revolution upon which the youth of all Europe had pinned its hopes for a better world issuing in indiscriminate suspicion and terror—should, instead of writing an epic of despondency and gloom, have written a paean to progress.
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. It is a relatively new idea for men to have and to hold.
Progress—A Definition
What shall we mean by “progress”? Subjective definitions will not do; we must not conceive progress in terms of one nation, or one religion, or one code of morals; an increase of kindness, for example, would alarm our young Nietzscheans. Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness. Is it possible to find an objective definition for our term—one that will hold for any individual, any group, even for any species? Let us provisionally define progress as “increasing control of the environment by life,” and let us mean by environment “all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire.” Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.
It need not be continuous in order to be real. There may be “plateaus” in it, Dark Ages and disheartening retrogressions, but if the last stage is the highest of all we shall say that man makes progress. And in assessing epochs and nations we must guard against loose thinking. We must not compare nations in their youth with nations in the mellowness of their cultural maturity, and we must not compare the worst or the best of one age with the selected best or worst of all the collected past. If we find that the type of genius prevalent in young countries like America and Australia tends to the executive, explorative, and scientific kind rather than to the painter of pictures or poems, the carver of statues or words, we shall understand that each age and place calls for and needs certain brands of genius rather than others, and that the cultural sort can only come when its practical predecessors have cleared the forest and prepared the way. If we find that civilizations come and go, and mortality is upon all the works of man, we shall confess the irrefutability of death, and be consoled if, during the day of our lives and our nations, we move slowly upward, and become a little better than we were. If we find that philosophers are of slighter stature now than in the days of broad-backed Plato and the substantial Socrates, that our sculptors are lesser men than Donatello or Angelo, our painters inferior to Velázquez, our poets and composers unnameable with Shelley and Bach, we shall not despair; these stars did not all shine on the same night. Our problem is whether the total and average level of human ability has increased, and stands at its peak today.