For us, however, the career of the outline begins with H. G. Wells. The historians did not quite know what to do with The Outline of History; Professor Schapiro described it as full of errors, and a liberal education. It was full of errors, as any book of large scope is bound to be; but it was an astonishing and stimulating performance for one mind. The journalistic genius of Mr. Wells had tied the volumes up with the movement towards international peace, and had entered them as an important team in the “race between education and catastrophe.” No one wanted catastrophe, and every one bought the book. History became popular, and historians became alarmed. Now it would be necessary for them to write as interestingly as H. G. Wells.
Strange to say, two of them did. Professor Breasted, of Chicago and Egypt, revised and improved an old text-book, and Professor Robinson did the same; an enterprising publishing firm gathered their work into two handsome volumes, gave them a captivating title—The Human Adventure—and issued the best outline of all, a masterpiece of exposition as authoritative as a German and as clear as a Gaul. Nothing in their field has equaled those volumes to date.
Meanwhile Hendrik Willem van Loon had romped over the same ground with a pen in one hand, a pencil in the other, and a twinkle in his eyes. He cared nothing for dignity, and loved a joke surpassing well; he went laughing down the centuries, and pointed his moral with drawings and smiles. Adults bought The Story of Mankind for their children, and surreptitiously read it themselves. The world was becoming scandalously informed about history.
The appetite of the layman grew by what it fed on. There were in America millions of men and women who had been unable to go to college, and who thirsted for the findings of history and science; even those who had gone through college showed a moderate hunger for knowledge. When John Macy published The Story of the World’s Literature thousands welcomed it as a genial and illuminating survey of a fascinating field. And when The Story of Philosophy appeared it had the good fortune to catch this wave of curiosity on the rise, and to be lifted to an undreamed-of popularity. Readers were astonished to find that philosophy was interesting because it was, literally, a matter of life and death. They passed along the word to their friends, and soon it became the fashion to praise, to buy, even, occasionally, to read, this book that had been written for a few. All in all it was such a success as no author who has known it once can ever hope to know again.
Then came the flood. Outline followed outline, “story” followed “story”; science and art, religion and law, had their storiographers, and Bekker’s slight essay was avidly transformed into The Story of Religion. One author produced in one volume an outline of all knowledge, thereby making Wells, van Loon, Macy, Slosson, Breasted and the rest superfluous. The public appetite was quickly satiated; critics and professors complained of superficiality and haste, and an undertow of resentment set in, which reached every outline from the last to the first. As quickly as it had come, the fashion changed; no one dared any longer say a word for the humanization of knowledge; the denunciation of outlines was now the easy road to critical repute; it became the style to speak with a delicate superiority of any non-fiction book that could be understood. The snob movement in literature began.
III
Many of the criticisms were disagreeably just. The Story of Philosophy was, and is, shot through with defects. First of all, it was incomplete. The total omission of scholastic philosophy was an outrage, forgivable only in one who had suffered much from it in college and seminary, and resented it thereafter as rather a disguised theology than an honest philosophy. It is true that in some cases (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spencer, Voltaire) the exposition of doctrine was more complete than in most histories of philosophy, regardless of their length. And it is true that the very first page frankly announced:
This book is not a complete history of philosophy. It is an attempt to humanize knowledge by centering the story of speculative thought around certain dominant personalities. Certain lesser figures have been omitted in order that those selected might have the space required to make them live. (Preface.)
Nevertheless the incompleteness remained. The worst sin of all—though the critics do not seem to have noticed it—was the omission of Chinese and Hindu philosophy. Even a “story” of philosophy that begins with Socrates, and has nothing to say about Lao-tze and Confucius, Mencius and Chwang-tze, Buddha and Shankara, is provincially incomplete.1 As for the word Story, which has since been so abused with use, it was chosen partly to indicate that the record would concern itself chiefly with the more vital philosophers, partly to convey the sense that the development of thought was a romance as stirring as any in history.
No apology is offered for the neglect of epistemology. That dismal science received its due in the chapter on Kant, where for forty pages the reader was invited to consider the puzzles of perception. This chapter should have pleased the young pundit, for it came very near to obscurity. (However, one professor of philosophy, in a Midwest university, sent in the information that he had been teaching Kant for fifteen years, and had never understood Kant’s meaning until he read this elementary chapter.) For the rest, the book suggested unamiably that the nature of the knowledge process was but one of the many problems of philosophy; that this single problem was unfit to absorb the attention which the savants and the Germans had lavished upon it; and that its weary exploitation was largely responsible for the decadence of philosophy. The French have never yielded to this craze for epistemology to the exclusion of moral and political, historical and religious philosophy; and today even the Germans are recovering from it. Hear Keyserling: “Philosophy is essentially the completion of science in the synthesis of wisdom . . . . Epistemology, phenomenology, logic, etc., certainly are important branches of science.” (Precisely; they are branches of science, like chemistry or anatomy.) “But it was an unmitigated evil that as the result of this, the sense for the living synthesis should have disappeared.” (Creative Understanding, New York, 1929, p. 125.) This from a German—a Daniel come to judgment. And Spengler describes the earlier Chinese philosophers, down to Confucius, as “statesmen, regents, lawgivers, like Pythagoras and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz . . . . They were sturdy philosophers for whom epistemology was the knowledge of the important relations of actual life.” (Decline of the West, vol. i, p. 42.) Doubtless now that epistemology is dying in Germany, it will be exported to America, as a fit return for the gift of democracy.
The Chinese philosophers were not only averse to epistemology, they had an almost Gallic disdain for prolonged metaphysics. No young metaphysician could admit that Confucius is a philosopher, for he says nothing about metaphysics, and less about epistemology; he is as positivistic as Spencer or Comte; his concern is always for morals and the state. Worse than that, he is disreputably intelligible; and nothing could be so damaging to a philosopher. But we “moderns” have become so accustomed to windy verbiage in philosophy that when philosophy is presented without the verbiage we can with difficulty recognize it. One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.