For a Lifelong Pursuit

of Wisdom

MORTIMER J. ADLER

MACMILLAN PUBLISHING COMPANY

NEW YORK

COLLIER MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS

LONDON
ALSO BY MORTIMER J. ADLER

Dialectic
What Man Has Made of Man
How to Read a Book
How to Think About War and Peace
The Capitalist Manifesto (with Louis O. Kelso)
The Idea of Freedom
The Conditions of Philosophy
The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes
The Time of Our Lives
The Common Sense of Politics
The American Testament (with William Gorman)
Some Questions About Language
Philosopher at Large
Reforming Education
Great Treasury of Western Thought (with Charles Van Doren)
Aristotle for Everybody
How to Think About God
Six Great Ideas
The Angels and Us
The Paideia Proposal
How to Speak/How to Listen
Paideia Problems and Possibilities
A Vision of the Future
The Paideia Program
Ten Philosophical Mistakes
 V

Copyright © 1986 by Mortimer J. Adler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Macmillan Publishing Company

866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10002
Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-
A guidebook to learning.
List of author’s works: p. ii
Bibliography: p. 161
1. Learning and scholarship. I. Title.
AZ221.A35 1986 001.2 85-23778
ISBN 0-02-500340-2

N Ik purchases
f< 1.2, Ad59g nal use.

F Adler5 Mortimer Jerome.

A guidebook to
1 earning.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 n

Printed in the United States of America

Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and George

Allen & Unwin, Ltd, London, for permission to quote from Jose Ortega y Gas¬
set’s The Revolt of the Masses, copyright 1932; and to Princeton University
Press for permission to quote from Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Mission of the Uni¬
versity, translated with an introduction by Howard Lee Nostrand, copyright
1944, © renewed 1972 by Princeton University Press.

jft.F* PUBLIC LIBRARY

3 1223 04080 0311
TO

JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET

whose understanding of the humanities as

the cure for the barbarism of specialization
inspired the establishment of the
Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies
Note to the Reader

I can think of no better way to start readers off than to

tell them plainly what lies ahead.
This I can do most effectively by quoting here the
opening paragraphs of Chapter 13.

I can imagine that some readers who have been patient and
persistent enough to reach this point will be somewhat per¬
plexed. They are likely to be wondering what all they have been
through adds up to and what comes next.
That state of mind on the part of readers may help me to
achieve the objective I had in mind in writing this book.
I have given in the preceding pages a survey of the state of
learning in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in modern times.
In my judgment it was necessary for readers to become ac¬
quainted with the traditional maps or charts of learning in
those periods, so as to appreciate their need for clarification
and their need for guidance as to the state of learning in the
contemporary world. Such guidance is not to be found in the
literature of this subject.

The contribution, which I believe this book makes,

consists in providing needed philosophical insights and
distinctions that enable us to lay out the geography, as it
1 vii ]
 <*>

Note to the Reader

were, of the realm of learning. I venture to say that read¬

ers will find nothing comparable to it elsewhere. My rea¬
son for surveying the literature from antiquity to the
present day was to allow readers to judge for themselves
whether I have succeeded in my effort to throw light in
dark corners. I also hope they will find the recommen¬
dations I offer in the Conclusion of this book helpful as
guidelines for self-conducted learning in the mature years
of their lives.
I suggest that readers examine the Contents to see what
lies ahead, and that they ponder the following statement
by Aristotle, which they will find again on the title page
of Part Two.

It is necessary to call into council the views of our predeces¬

sors in order that we may profit by whatever is sound in their
views and avoid their errors.

I think I have done what Aristotle recommends; and I

hope that, by my doing so, readers will find in the clos¬
ing chapters of this book the enlightenment they seek.

M.J. A.
Carisch House
Aspen, Colorado
September 1985

[ viii ]
Contents

INTRODUCTION: WHO NEEDS GUIDANCE AND WHY 1

PART ONE: ALPHABETIASIS: FROM A TO Z

1. The Merits and Demerits of Alphabetical

Arrangements 9

2. Encyclopedias 12

3. Universities 21

4. Libraries 30

PART TWO: THE ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE PRIOR

TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

5. Greek and Roman Antiquity 39

Plato (428-384 b.c.) 39

Aristotle (384-322 b.c.) 42

[ ix ]
r
 V

Contents

The Roman Stoics (First and Second

Centuries a.d.) 46

Augustine (354-430) 47

6. The Middle Ages 48

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) 48

Roger Bacon (1214-1292) 50

7. Modern Times: Seventeenth Century 52

Francis Bacon (1561—1626) 52

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) 57

John Locke (1632-1704) 60

8. Modern Times: Eighteenth Century 62

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and

Jean d’Alembert (1717-1783) 62

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) 64

9. Modern Times: Nineteenth Century 68

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) 68

Andr£ Marie Ampere (1775-1836) 70

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) 71

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) 73

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) 73

[ x ]
 Contents

PART THREE: CONTEMPORARY EFFORTS TO

ORGANIZE KNOWLEDGE

10. A Twentieth-Century Proposal 77

11. The Propaedia 82

12. The Syntopicon 96

PART FOUR: PHILOSOPHICAL ILLUMINATION

13. What Comes Next 107

14. Indispensable Insights and Distinctions 110

The Goods of the Mind 110

The Modes of Knowing 113
Episteme and Paideia 116
Art and Science 120
The Classification of the Arts 121
The Order of the Sciences 122
History, Poetry, and Philosophy 124
The Transcendental Forms 127

15. Recapitulation: An Aide-Memoire for the

Reader 135

CONCLUSION: PAIDEIA FOR THE AUTODIDACT 139

APPENDIX I: THE PROPAEDIA’S SYNOPTIC

OUTLINE OF KNOWLEDGE 149
 *

Contents

APPENDIX II: ORTEGA ON THE BARBARISM

OF SPECIALIZATION 159

APPENDIX III: SOME BOOKS THAT MAY BE

HELPFUL TO AUTODIDACTS 161

[ xii ]
Introduction:
Who Needs Guidance
and Why

THIS book is intended for all who have gradually come

to understand what young persons, still in school, col¬
lege, or university, do not know and find difficult to un¬
derstand. For the most part, their teachers also fail to
acknowledge the point in question. It is that no young
person can complete his or her education in school, col¬
lege, or university for the simple reason that youth it¬
self—immaturity—is an insuperable obstacle to becoming
a truly educated human being while still young.
One’s education can be begun in institutions but it can
never be completed there. Only a truly mature or adult
person can possibly attain the kind of education that
produces generally cultivated human beings, men and
women who feel at home in the whole world of human
knowledge, know their way around in it, and have the
kind of understanding of basic ideas, issues, and values,
together with some modicum of wisdom, that everyone
should aspire to possess.
A recent report on college offerings and student choices
voices the complaint that the elective system with its ever-
increasing specialization of courses offered and the ten-

[ 1 ]
 Introduction: Who Needs Guidance and Why

dency of students to choose lines of specialization that

promise immediate rewards in the marketplace, has re¬
sulted in the neglect of studies essential to the general
cultivation of the mind. The report insists that for the
latter purpose “some things are more important to know
than others.”
Schooling that is general rather than specialized, lib¬
eral rather than vocational, and humanistic rather than
technical, should prepare the young for continued learn¬
ing in adult life, after all schooling has been completed,
without which this aspiration cannot be fulfilled and this
attainment achieved. While this is not the only goal of
schooling, it is certainly its most important objective.
Since everyone has a natural human right to aspire to
become a truly educated person in the later years of life,
the kind of schooling that serves this purpose should be
accessible to everyone. That is why twenty-two persons,
who joined with me in recommending a radical reform
in our system of basic schooling, proposed that general,
liberal, and humanistic education should start at the level
of basic schooling, and should be supplemented to a
modest extent in our highly specialized colleges and
universities.* Only in this way can all be properly pre¬
pared, some more than others, for the continued learning
that all should attempt to carry on in adult life in order
to complete their education.
Since our basic schooling up to the present is far from
being the kind of schooling recommended in The Pai-
deia Proposal, everyone stands in need of the help that
this book tries to provide. If they are to become truly ed¬
ucated human beings, they must embark on the sea of
learning in adult life.
To set out on such a voyage without charts and maps

*See The Paideia Proposal, 1982.

[ 2 ]
 Introduction: Who Needs Guidance and Why

is to be without a point of departure, an appointed des¬

tination, lacking knowledge of currents, of reefs and
shoals, of depth and shallows, of distances and di¬
rections.
I have called this work a guidebook precisely because
it attempts to provide something like a chart or map for
the journey that everyone should undertake with the hope
of finally reaching the understanding and wisdom that is
the beckoning goal and culmination of the effort.
In antiquity, in the great centuries of the medieval era,
and in modern times up until the end of the nineteenth
century, the sea of learning was mapped and charted for
those who wished to venture on voyages of exploration
and discovery.
Ours is the century of the knowledge explosion. We are
living in what has been called the information society.
We are suffering from what Jose Ortega y Gasset has called
“the barbarism of specialization,” which dismisses a
generalist approach to the world of learning as amateur¬
ism. It also finds a merely alphabetical ordering of the
specialized parts of knowledge more congenial than any
attempt to present a general scheme for the organization
of knowledge.
Whatever merits and demerits such schemes may have
had in earlier centuries, they were certainly appropriate
to the state of affairs that then existed. They served the
purpose for which they were constructed; but they are
no longer appropriate today. They are viewed by us as
relics or antiques in the museum of intellectual car¬
tography.
We must overhaul and redraft them to make them use¬
ful. Short of doing that, we are without charts or maps.
No comprehensive chart or map of the vast expanse of
learning that lies before us is available for our use. In this
century of the knowledge explosion and in our informa-

[ 3 ]
 *

Introduction: Who Needs Guidance and Why

tion society it is paradoxical, to say the least, that we

should lack what earlier centuries had when there was
so much less knowledge to be explored and organized.
Where would anyone now turn to find a comprehen¬
sive outline of knowledge or a schematic diagram of the
arts and sciences and of other disciplines as well? Cer¬
tainly not to the catalogues of schools, departments, and
courses in our great universities. Certainly not to most of
the encyclopedias that can be found on the shelves of li¬
braries, and sometimes in our homes as well.
Let me explain my reference to university catalogues
and general encyclopedias as two prime examples of the
plight we are in. They are alike in two respects: they are
both alphabetically organized, and each in its own way
purports to cover the whole scope of knowledge or
learning.
The word “university” echoes the word “universe”—
an all-inclusive whole in which everything can be found.
The very word “encyclopedia” promises to provide the
great circle (encyclo) of general learning (paideiaj that
every cultivated human being should possess.
Indications of everything to be studied and learned are
there in some fashion. But in what order, to what extent,
of what value, for what purpose? That is not indicated at
all. Nor is there any indication of lines of connection and
separation that might enable us to plot or plan different
ways of starting out, carrying on, and ending up if we
wish to undertake a voyage of exploration and discov¬
ery, one that, if it is begun in youth, must continue
throughout adult life.
To remedy this deficiency, I propose to proceed as fol¬
lows. In Part One, I will use the alphabetical ordering of
subjects in general encyclopedias and the alphabetical
ordering of courses in university catalogues to present the
bewildering chaos that confronts us. I will supplement

1 4 ]
 Introduction: Who Needs Guidance and Why

this by considering card catalogue systems used for or¬

ganizing books on the shelves of great libraries.
In Part Two, I will report, explain, and criticize the
charts and maps of learning that we have inherited from
the past. Readers will see why they must be amended and
extended to be of service to us today. Then, in Part Three,
I will call attention to contemporary efforts to do some¬
thing about remedying the encyclopedic affliction I have
called alphabetiasis.
Finally, I will present, in Part Four, the indispensable
insights and distinctions that give us the guidelines to
learning appropriate for us today. With these distinc¬
tions in mind, I think I can turn the chaos we face into
a more orderly picture, one that will enable me to sug¬
gest an itinerary for a lifelong pursuit of wisdom. That I
have attempted to do briefly in the Conclusion.

1 5 ]
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1

The Merits and Demerits of

Alphabetical Arrangements

NOT all languages have alphabets, but the Indo-Euro¬

pean languages that do have them confer certain benefits
upon the peoples that speak these languages.
The most obvious purpose to which alphabets have
been put to use is in the arrangement of large assem¬
blages of items, such as the names in a telephone book,
the words in a standard dictionary, the entries in an in¬
dex, and the cards in a library catalogue. Their alphabet¬
ical arrangement provides an easy mode of access for
anyone who wishes to find a particular item the initial
letter of which is known.
An alphabetical ordering of items facilitates all look-it-
up-to-find efforts. In most of the examples mentioned
above no other ordering would serve that purpose, or serve
it as well. In fact, any other ordering of the words in a
dictionary or the entries in an index would amount to
randomness.
The reason for this is that one cannot find, applicable
to these materials, any principles or criteria for assort¬
ing, relating, and ordering them. No inherent intelligible
connection exists between one item or set of items and
another.
[ 9 ]
 s

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

One other type of ordering is similar to alphabetizing

an assemblage of items. That is a chronological ordering,
which is useful, for example, in making a list of recom¬
mended readings by listing the books in the chronologi¬
cal order of their authors’ lives. Doing this enables one
to avoid any and all judgments about the scale of impor¬
tance on which the books recommended might be arrayed.
Both alphabetical and chronological ordering exempt
us from having to make value judgments. We are espe¬
cially grateful for this if we fear, as many do, that mak¬
ing such judgments is likely to be tendentious or
attributable to our purely personal prejudices.
There is still a further advantage to be gained by em¬
ploying the alphabet or dates to arrange an assemblage of
items. Not only are we exempt from having to make value
judgments about the items being considered, but also we
are free from the burden of having to think about what
inner connections among them might suggest a signifi¬
cant pattern of their relationships to one another.
Alphabetization is particularly applicable to the items
we find in reference books. But when it is also applied
to the articles in a general encyclopedia or to the depart¬
ments of learning in a university catalogue we are com¬
pelled to ask whether resorting solely to the alphabet is
not an intellectual dereliction.
The immediate negative reply might be that an ency¬
clopedia like a dictionary, or a university catalogue like
a catalogue of library index cards, is after all just a ref¬
erence tool—something to be used for look-it-up pur¬
poses only. A moment’s reflection challenges that too-easy
answer.
A great general encyclopedia is not just a reference
book. It is also an instrument of learning in the same way
that a great university is an institution of learning. In¬
herent in the things to be learned we should be able to

[ 10 ]
The Merits and Demerits of Alphabetical Arrangements

find inner connections that might enable us to discover

a significant pattern of their relationships to one another.
We might even dare to construct a scale of values ac¬
cording to which we can judge their importance to us as
things to be studied and learned. Instead of evading that
challenge by saying nothing is more important to know
than anything else, we should be willing to make judg¬
ments that scale the parts of knowledge from the less to
the more important.
Not to do so where it is possible is an evasion of intel¬
lectual responsibility. Doing so does not necessitate
abandoning an alphabetical ordering of the same mate¬
rials for look-it-up or reference purposes. I would cer¬
tainly not advocate a totally nonalphabetical encyclopedia,
devoid of any use as a reference book; nor would I sug¬
gest that university catalogues be different from what they
are now.
I am only saying that both need and deserve to be sup¬
plemented by an ordering that is more significant and in¬
telligible than the one provided by alphabetization, which
is no more significant or intelligible than a purely ran¬
dom array.
I have coined the word “alphabetiasis” to name the in¬
tellectual defect that consists in refusing to go beyond the
alphabet where going beyond it is possible. It is strictly
a modern malaise, more widespread in the twentieth
century than at any earlier time.
Our universities invite us to embark on the sea of
learning, but without charts and maps that might guide
us in our progress or that might give us some significant
direction in which to proceed. The same holds true, with
a very few exceptions, of our great encyclopedias.

[ n ]
CHAPTER 2

Encyclopedias

SCHOLARS who write learned articles on the history of

encyclopedias tend to use that word in an extended sense.
This may puzzle contemporary readers who use it to re¬
fer to a set of books the contents of which are arranged
from A to Z. Paying attention to the meaning of the word’s
Greek roots, scholars apply it to any collection of writ¬
ings that provides a complete system of learning or an
all-around education. The collection of writings must
have, for its time and place, a scope that justifies regard¬
ing it as encyclopedic in its dimensions.
The lectures of Aristotle delivered at his Lyceum in the
fourth century b.c., and later edited and compiled as an
orderly set of treatises, can be so regarded. Beginning with
treatises on physical phenomena and on the motion of
the heavens, followed by a large number of treatises
dealing with plants and animals and all the phenomena
of life, and completed by a treatise on the souls of living
organisms, the theoretical works of Aristotle reach their
culmination in a treatise to which his editors gave the
title “Metaphysics,” the final sections of which are the¬
ological. This series of works is then followed by trea¬
tises of another kind, practical rather than theoretical,
dealing with ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. Pref¬
acing the series as a whole are treatises on logic and the

[ 12 ]
 Encyclopedias

method of the sciences, grouped together under the title

“Organon.”
Implicit in this ordering of Aristotle’s works is a scheme
for the organization of knowledge. As we shall subse¬
quently discover when we return to it in another con¬
text, it represents the most comprehensive and most
clearly articulated plan for the organization of knowl¬
edge that has come down to us from antiquity. But the
whole corpus of Aristotle’s works is not an encyclopedia
in the modern sense of that term, nor was it intended to
be one.
This is equally true of all the other examples that
scholarly expositions of the history of encyclopedia point
to in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Natural History,
written by Pliny the Elder in the first century of our era,
consists of thirty-seven books covering the arts as well as
the sciences as then generally understood. Medieval
compilations of all the knowledge then extant—one by
Hugh of St. Victor and one by Vincent of Beauvais in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries—are of a similar character.
All of these, like the collected works of Aristotle, are
encyclopedic in the comprehensiveness of their cover¬
age of all the knowledge existing at the time, but none is
an encyclopedia of the kind that made its first appear¬
ance in the West in the seventeenth century. Nor are the
elaborate collections of writings that the Chinese look back
upon with pride and now call encyclopedias. They are
anthologies of revered classics rather than systematic ex¬
positions of existing knowledge.
The first set of books constructed as a survey of exist¬
ing knowledge appeared at the beginning of the eigh¬
teenth century, in 1704. It was the work of John Harris
and was called by him a lexicon—A Universal English
Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences. The use of the word
“dictionary” in the subtitle notified readers that they could

[ 13 ]
 Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

expect an alphabetical arrangement of the articles com¬

posing the work as a whole.
Harris’s work was soon followed in the eighteenth
century by that of Ephraim Chambers, who produced a
two-volume work entitled Cyclopedia; or an Universal
Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences (1728); by the fa¬
mous French Encyclopedic, compiled by Diderot,
d’Alembert, and their colleagues, issued in a series of
volumes that began in 1751 and ended in 1778, twenty-
eight volumes in all; and by the Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica, published in Scotland in three volumes in the years
1768-1771. It, too, was called by its editors A Dictionary
of the Arts and Sciences, the word “dictionary” being
used in all these instances to signify the alphabetical ar¬
rangement of the articles that constituted the single com¬
prehensive work.
The nineteenth century witnessed the proliferation of
similar compilations constructed like lexicons or dic¬
tionaries—beginning with one by Brockhaus in Germany
(1808), which inspired similar works in Danish, Swed¬
ish, Dutch, Russian, French, and Italian, and which were
followed by an American effort, the Encyclopedia Amer¬
icana, published in Philadelphia in thirteen volumes in
the years 1829-1833. All of these comprised a large
number of short popular articles on a wide variety of
subjects that aimed at a comprehensiveness of coverage
that deserved the name “encyclopedia.”
The Encyclopaedia Britannica is distinguished from all
the rest by the continuous history of its publication from
1768 to the present day in fifteen successive editions,
growing from the three-volume first edition to the thirty-
two volume fifteenth edition, currently in print. It is also
distinguished by the arrangement of the articles that
constituted its first edition.
In the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the

1 14 ]
 Encyclopedias

single alphabetical order of the articles was broken up into

two quite different kinds of entries, all alphabetically ar¬
ranged from A to Z.
On the one hand, there was a large number of ex¬
tremely brief entries never more than a short paragraph
and often consisting of a couple of lines, such as the en¬
try on Japan, which is described as “a small island off
the coast of California.”
On the other hand, there was a relatively small num¬
ber of extremely long articles—essays, dissertations, or
treatises on the major subjects that expounded the
knowledge the editors thought their readers should have
about all the arts and sciences then recognized as having
theoretical significance or practical importance.
Although these two types of entries were arranged in
a single alphabetical sequence, they were distinguished
typographically: the short entries resembling the entries
in a lexicon of words with their definitions, and the long
articles resembling books with many subdivisions, just as
a book is divided into many chapters.
What follows is an enumeration by title of the major
treatises or essays that appeared in the first edition of
Britannica. It has interest for us as a representation of
what the world of learning looked like in the eighteenth
century. The alphabetical arrangement of these major ar¬
ticles in the first edition also clearly exemplifies the ab¬
sence of any significant principle for the ordering of the
parts of knowledge. As compared with Aristotle’s non-
alphabetical encyclopedic coverage of all the knowledge
then extant, Britannica’s alphabetical encyclopedia does
not present us with anything like a systematic and prin¬
cipled organization of human knowledge.

Agriculture Alligation Annuities

Algebra Anatomy Architecture

[ 15 1
 Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

Arithmetick Geography -M-usiek"

Astronomy Grammar
Natnrat History"
Bleaching Horsemanship; Navigation
Book-keeping Or, The Art of Riding,
and of Training and Optics--
Botany
Brewing Managing Horses
Perspective
Hydrostatics
Chemistry Pneumatics-
Commerce Law
Religion, or Theology
Conic Sections Logic
Short-Hand Writing
Electricity Mechanics
Surgery
Medicine
Farriery
Metaphysics Tanning
Fluxions
Midwifery
Fortification
Moral Philosophy,
Gardening or Morals Watch and Clock Work

As far as I know, the first critic of the alphabetical ar¬

rangement of the articles in an encyclopedia was Samuel
Taylor Coleridge at the beginning of the nineteenth cen¬
tury. He wrote a Preliminary Treatise on Method in which
he set forth the principles for constructing an encyclo¬
pedia that was a systematic organization of knowledge
rather than a mere alphabetical arrangement of articles,
whether long or short. The Encyclopedia Metropolitana,
which was to be that encyclopedia, he began but never
finished.
We have in Coleridge’s own words what he thought of
all encyclopedias that, unlike the one he contemplated
producing, suffered the defect of alphabetiasis. He wrote:

To call a huge unconnected miscellany of the omne scibile [the

whole of knowledge], in any arrangement determined by the
 Encyclopedias

accident of initial letters, an encyclopedia, is the impudent ig¬

norance of your Presbyterian bookmakers!

The Presbyterian bookmakers Coleridge had in mind must

have been the Scottish editors of Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica’s first edition. What he attributed to impudent ig¬
norance might have been more generously explained as
an effort on their part to make their encyclopedia useful
as a reference book.pn the same way that a dictionary is
useful. A systematic, nonalphabetical order of articles may
provide the users of an encyclopedia with an organiza¬
tion of knowledge—a map or chart of the world of learn¬
ing—but it also prevents them from using it as a reference
work in which they can easily look up something in
which they are interested.
This conflict between two ways of constructing an en¬
cyclopedia, each with its merits and demerits, was not
explicitly addressed in the continuous history of Ency¬
clopaedia Britannica until the eleventh edition in the
twentieth century, in 1911 to be precise. From the sec¬
ond to the great ninth edition, Britannica retained a sin¬
gle alphabetical arrangement without any effort to
overcome its central defect—the absence of any indica¬
tion of how the parts of knowledge are related to one an¬
other systematically.
When we come in this century to the eleventh edition,
we find the following opening paragraphs in the Preface
written by the editors.

It is not perhaps commonly realized that a general Encyclo¬

paedia is more than a mere storehouse of facts. In reality it is
also a systematic survey of all departments of knowledge.
But the alphabetical system of arrangement, with its obvious
advantages, necessarily results in the separation from one an¬
other of articles dealing with any particular subject. Conse¬
quently the student who desires to make a complete study of

[ 17 ]
 Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

a given topic must exercise his imagination if he seeks to ex¬

haust the articles in which the topic is treated. Though the In¬
dex proper . . . will give him assistance in obtaining
information under headings which are not themselves the ti¬
tles of articles in the Encyclopaedia, he will still find it of the
greatest service to have a bird’s-eye view of all the articles upon
his subject.
The ensuing pages of this volume contain what we believe
to be the first attempt in any general work of reference at a sys¬
tematic subject catalogue or analysis of the material contained
in it.

What follows is an enumeration of the twenty-four

general headings or main categories in the Classified Ta¬
ble of Contents under which are listed the more specific
subjects treated in the encyclopedia.

I. Anthropology and XIV. Language and

Ethnology Writing
II. Archaeology and XV. Law and Political
Antiquities Science
III. Art XVI. Literature
IV. Astronomy XVII. Mathematics
V. Biology XVIII. Medical Science
VI. Chemistry XIX. Military and Naval
VII. Economics and XX. Philosophy and
Social Science Psychology
VIII. Education XXI. Physics
IX. Engineering XXII. Religion and
X. Geography Theology
XI. Geology XXIII. Sports and Pastimes
XII. History XXIV. Miscellaneous
XIII. Industries,
Manufactures, and
Occupations
 Encyclopedias

Remarkable as it was at the time, this Classified Table

of Contents did not succeed in overcoming the defects of
an alphabetical arrangement of articles. It was not a sys¬
tematic or topical organization of knowledge. An inspec¬
tion of the foregoing list of twenty-four headings or
categories immediately reveals that the alphabet was still
the only thread on which the constituent parts of knowl¬
edge were strung.
Furthermore, under each of the alphabetically ar¬
ranged main categories or general headings, from An¬
thropology to Religion and Theology (omitting Sports and
Pastimes and Miscellaneous), the further subdivisions,
after an initial enumeration of general subjects, consist
of more specific headings, also alphabetically arranged.
For example, under the general heading Art, we find
Architecture, Music, Painting and Engraving, Sculpture,
Stage and Dancing, interrupted here and there by the
heading Minor Arts. Beyond that, if we look at the list¬
ing of particular articles in this Classified Table of Con¬
tents, we find that their enumeration is also alphabetical.
What the editors of the eleventh edition said in their
preface was unquestionably sound. A general encyclo¬
pedia should be “more than a mere storehouse of facts”—
more than a reference book with alphabetically arranged
entries that, like a dictionary, enables users to look
something up. To do more than that, it must offer its users
a mode of access to its contents other than the alphabet.
It must, in one way or another, present its readers with
a systematic or topical outline of knowledge that maps
or charts the whole world of learning in a way that pro¬
vides guidelines for the exploration of all its related parts.
With two or three notable exceptions, no encyclopedia
so far completed in the twentieth century corrects the
defects of alphabetiasis—a malady peculiar to modern
times, and especially prevalent in our day. I will deal with

[ 19 ]
 *

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

these exceptions in Part Three after I review, in Part Two,

ancient, medieval, and modern attempts to map or chart
the world of learning, quite apart from the publication of
encyclopedias constructed on the dictionary model.
But first let us continue the examination of the alpha¬
betiasis that prevails today by turning from general en¬
cyclopedias to the catalogues of our great universities.

1 20 ]
CHAPTER 3

Universities

AS we have seen, most encyclopedias, past and present,

do not provide guidance for exploring the world of
learning that they comprehensively cover. Nor do uni¬
versity catalogues. They, too, are mostly A to Z affairs.
They cover everything, but in the range of subjects they
present, one thing is not shown to be more important than
another. A university catalogue is no more a guidebook
to learning than a Sears Roebuck catalogue is a guide¬
book to buying.
Was this always the case? Or is it largely a twentieth-
century phenomenon, symptomatic of the contemporary
retreat from any effort to evaluate subjects and grade them
on a scale of importance or significance?
When universities came into being in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, in Padua and Paris, in Oxford and
Cambridge, the main divisions of learning were manifest
in the four faculties that constituted them. One of these
was the faculty of arts. The other three were the profes¬
sional faculties of medicine, law, and theology.
The latter, in the order named, corresponded to prac¬
tical concerns of less and greater importance: the care of
the body, the conduct of life and of society, and the sal¬
vation of the soul. In referring to these three areas of
1 21 ]
 *

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

concern as practical, I am calling attention to the fact that

the men who became doctors of medicine, of law, and of
theology were not only men of learning, but also the
practitioners of learned professions.
In contrast, the faculty of arts represented general as
opposed to specialized learning, and learning for its own
sake rather than for its useful application to some spe¬
cial field of practice or action. This faculty consisted of
teachers who bore the title Master of Arts. The students
they succeeded in initiating into the world of general
learning were certified as Bachelors of Arts.
As it is generally used today to signify mainly the fine
arts, and sometimes even more narrowly the visual arts
as differentiated horn literature, music, and other fine arts,
the word “arts” does not convey the scope of this non-
professional branch of a medieval university. What was
signified by the word “arts” included all the liberal arts,
both those of language and those of mathematics. It also
included all the sciences, which were regarded as
branches of philosophy, both speculative or theoretical
and practical or moral.
The faculty of arts might, therefore, have been more
appropriately called the philosophical faculty or even,
perhaps, the faculty of the humanities or of humane let¬
ters. But once again we must guard against the current
use of these terms by remembering that the Latin word
“humanitas,” translating the Greek word “paideia,” sig¬
nifies general as opposed to specialized learning. Thus
understood, it includes all branches of learning, not just
those that remain after we have named the various sci¬
ences, natural and social. We must also remember that
philosophy once meant the kind of learning that was
everybody’s business, not—as it has become in our day—
a highly technical field of specialized scholarship.
It was not until the nineteenth century that German

1 22 ]
 Universities

universities introduced the degree of doctor of philoso¬

phy to go along with the three professional doctorates in
medicine, law, and theology. When that happened phi¬
losophy no longer stood for general as opposed to
specialized learning. On the contrary, the faculty of phi¬
losophy comprehended within its scope all branches of
specialized scholarship, as specialized as medicine, law,
and theology, but differentiated from them by virtue of
the fact that these branches of specialized scholarship
were devoted to the advancement of learning for its own
sake, not for the sake of applying knowledge in practice
or action.
As originally established in the German universities of
the last century, the Ph.D. degree signified competence
in research and was awarded to scholars who intended
to devote themselves mainly to research. It was not a de¬
gree that was also supposed to certify competence in
teaching, as it has become in American universities to¬
day.
That the doctorate of philosophy was in origin, and still
persists as, a mark of specialized scholarship rather than
of broad, general, or humanistic learning is plainly in¬
dicated by the qualification that the degree always car¬
ries. One never receives a doctorate in philosophy as such,
but instead a Ph.D. in history, or in English, physics, ge¬
ology, economics, and so on. Even when one receives a
Ph.D. in philosophy, it is not in philosophy as a general
comprehension of all the arts and sciences, but in phi¬
losophy as just one among the many specialized fields of
study offered in a modern university.
The oldest academic organization in the United States,
concerned with the advancement of knowledge but not
with the dissemination of it by teaching, is the American
Philosophical Society. It was founded by Benjamin
Franklin in 1743; by 1769 it had established six areas of

[ 23 ]
 *

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

research, as follows: Geography, Mathematics, Natural

Philosophy, and Astronomy; Medicine and Anatomy;
Natural History and Chemistry; Trade and Commerce;
Mechanics and Architecture; and Husbandry and Amer¬
ican Improvements. The year 1815 brought with it the
addition of a seventh area: History, Moral Science, and
General Literature.
The foregoing was simplified in 1936 by a regrouping
of these areas under four headings: Mathematics and
Physical Sciences; Geological and Biological Sciences;
Social Sciences; and Humanities.
Many American universities today have adopted
something like this fourfold classification of all depart¬
ments of research and instruction. Sometimes it is a
threefold classification, as in Columbia University’s
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which is parti¬
tioned into the Social Sciences, the Natural Sciences, and
the Humanities. In any case, what is now called Human¬
ities is the residue that remains after all the branches of
science have been listed.
The listing is, as might be expected, mostly alphabeti¬
cal. Thus, under Columbia’s general heading of Natural
Sciences, we find:

Anatomy and Cell Biology Computer Science

Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering
Nuclear Engineering Geological Sciences
Astronomy Human Genetics and
Biochemistry Development
Biological Sciences Industrial Engineering and
Chemical Engineering and Operations Research
Applied Chemistry Mathematics
Chemistry Mechanical Engineering
Civil Engineering and Microbiology
Engineering Mechanics

1 24 ]
 Universities

Mining, Metallurgical, and Physics

Mineral Engineering Physiology
Pathology Psychology
Pharmacology Statistics

Under Social Sciences, we find:

Anthropology History
Economics Political Science
Geography Sociology

And under Humanities, the following:

Art History and Italian
Archaeology Linguistics
Classics Middle East Languages and
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Cultures Music
English and Comparative Philosophy
Literature Religion
French and Romance Slavic Languages
Philology Spanish and Portuguese
Germanic Languages

Whether under a fourfold or a threefold division, the

number of departments in our university graduate schools
is constantly on the increase. At Harvard University in
1919, there were fifteen academic departments. This in¬
creased to twenty-eight in 1949 and to thirty-one in 1976.
At Princeton University, the number of departments in¬
creased from fourteen in 1919 to twenty-six in 1976; at
the University of California at Berkeley, from thirty-nine
in 1919 to forty-three in 1976.
These increases are largely due to the proliferation of
the specialized sciences. When it was set up in 1863, the

[ 25 ]
 *

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

National Academy of Sciences comprised ten sections. In

a major reorganization that took place in 1975, this in¬
creased to twenty-three sections, the additions consist¬
ing entirely of sciences that did not exist one hundred
years ago.
The same proliferation has occurred in the profes¬
sional schools of our universities. In addition to the three
learned professions of medicine, law, and theology that
have come down to us from the Middle Ages, we now
have schools of business, of journalism, of social service,
of dentistry, of nursing, of engineering (with all its var¬
ious subdivisions), of computer technology, of educa¬
tion, of library science, of architecture, of agriculture, of
animal husbandry, and so on. The foregoing enumera¬
tion, although not alphabetical, is as much a random or¬
der as an alphabetical listing would be.
If we turn from our university’s graduate and profes¬
sional schools to their undergraduate colleges, the alpha¬
betical arrangement of courses in the catalogue is
determined by the initial letter in the name of the aca¬
demic department under the auspices of which these
course of instruction are given.
The alphabetical lists of departments in our colleges are
much too long to be reproduced here in full. To serve the
same purpose, I think it will suffice to present compara¬
ble samplings from four such lists, taken from the cur¬
rent catalogues of Columbia University, Yale University,
Harvard University, and the University of California at
Berkeley.
In each case, the comparable samples consist of de¬
partments running from C through F. These relatively
short samples will enable the reader to compare them at
a glance and to note how they differ, either by what they
add or what they omit. The differences represent a con¬
cern with subjects deemed of some importance for un-

[ 26 ]
 Universities

dergraduate instruction. But in all four cases, readers

should also note that all the departments named appear
to have equal status, one no more important in the realm
of learning than another.
These four alphabetical displays can be taken as fairly
representative of what is offered in almost all of our ma¬
jor colleges and universities. Here and there, as in Col¬
umbia’s two requirements and in Harvard’s six-pronged

COLUMBIA YALE

Chemistry Cell Biology

Classics Chemistry
Computer Science Classical Languages and Lit-
Contemporary Civilization eratures
Dance Comparative Literature
East Asian Languages and Computer Science
Cultures East Asian Languages and
Economics Literatures
Education East Asian Studies
Engineering Economic History
English and Comparative Economics
Literature Engineering and Applied
Film Science
French Language and Liter- English
ature Epidemiology and Public
Health
Experimental Pathology
Forestry and Environmental
Studies
French

[ 27 ]
 *

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

HARVARD UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA

Celtic Languages and Litera- Chemistry

tures Chicano Studies
Chemical Physics Classics
Chemistry Comparative Literature
The Classics Computer Science
Comparative Literature Development Studies
Computer Science Dramatic Arts
Dramatic Arts Dutch Studies
Earth and Planetary Physics East European Studies
East Asian Languages and Economics
Civilizations English
East Asian Programs Environmental Sciences
Economics Ethnic Studies
Engineering Sciences and Film
Applied Physics Folklore
English and American Liter¬ French
ature and Language
European Studies
Expository Writing
Fine Arts
Folklore and Mythology
French Language and Liter¬
ature

core requirement, certain fields of study are singled out

as indispensable for the acquisition of general learning.
These are among the few exceptions to the unrelieved al¬
phabetiasis of college offerings.
Beyond such requirements where they exist, students

[ 28 ]
 Universities

can exercise freedom of choice with regard to the sub¬

jects that will be of major or minor interest to them. The
alphabetical listing of courses gives them no guidance at
all for the exercise of that choice. It does not tell them
which subjects should be of major and which of minor
interest to them, and why. It leaves their choice of ma¬
jors and minors to the vagaries of their own ill-informed
current interests.

[ 29 ]
CHAPTER 4

Libraries

IT has been said that it is the mission of the wise man,

or of his less than alter ego, the philosopher, to judge the
value of things and to order them according to their merit.
Resorting to the alphabet as an organizing principle avoids
making the judgments antecedent to an ordering that re¬
flects relative worth, importance, or significance. It is an
abdication of wisdom and philosophy, all for the sake of
convenient reference.
In the chapters of Part Two, we shall consider how
philosophers—ancient, medieval, and modern—have
performed their ministry in the name of wisdom. But be¬
fore we come to that, we must look at one more unphil-
osophical approach to the problem of structuring the
whole world of learning, putting its parts in significant
relation to one another.
The approach I have in mind is that of librarians en¬
gaged in the task of classifying the books they must put
on their shelves in some orderly way. Alphabetizing them
by reference to the initial letter of the author’s name would
certainly not do; nor would it be useful to arrange them
chronologically by date of publication. Such an alpha¬
betical or chronological organization sometimes occurs
in cataloguing the books in a library, but not in a system
of classification.

[ 30 ]

/
/
 Libraries

Encyclopedias, universities, and libraries have a cer¬

tain similarity. All three, when they attain a certain mag¬
nitude, claim to be covering the whole sphere of what is
known, the whole realm of human learning at a given
time. A great encyclopedia covers it by articles that sur¬
vey and expound the parts and parcels of that whole, a
great university by the courses it offers, and a great li¬
brary by the books it puts on its shelves.
This parallelism might suggest that all three would or¬
ganize those parts and parcels in the same way. As we
have seen, this is true of encyclopedias and catalogues of
university courses. Both employ the alphabet, but librar¬
ies do not.
We do not know in what order the manuscript papyri
were laid out in the great library of Alexandria that was
burned to the ground by the Romans when they invaded
Egypt in the first century b.c. But it would be reasonable
to suppose that it was probably in accordance with Ar¬
istotelian principles. The same might be said of the great
libraries of Salamanca and Toledo in Moorish Spain in
the Middle Ages. Here, too, the ordering principles would
probably have been derived from the Islamic philoso¬
phers Avicenna and Averroes, both followers of Ar¬
istotle.
When we come to libraries that, after Gutenberg, first
put printed books on shelves, it would again be reason¬
able to expect that the ordering principles adopted by li¬
braries would follow the scheme for the organization of
knowledge to be found in Francis Bacon’s Advancement
of Learning. In the modern world, certainly in its early
centuries, Bacon replaced Aristotle as the organizer of
knowledge.
Bacon’s scheme in brief (we shall deal with it at greater
length later) was based on a threefold division of the hu¬
man faculties at work in the products of the mind, cer-

1 31 ]
 s

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

tainly in the production of books. Named in an ascending

order, they are memory, imagination, and reason. His¬
tory and biography, for example, belong in the sphere of
memory; poetry and fiction belong in the sphere of the
imagination; and all the sciences, or parts of philosophy,
belong in the sphere of reason.
When Thomas Jefferson built a library for himself at
his home in Monticello, Virginia, and shelved his own
collection of books there, he put them in an order that
corresponded to Bacon’s scheme. Jefferson’s library later
became the nucleus of the Library of Congress. The
threefold division of books proposed by Bacon necessar¬
ily required a great many subdivisions in order to ac¬
commodate the immense variety of books that fell under
each of the main categories. With forty-four subdivisions
added, the classification scheme of the Library of Con¬
gress remained unchanged from Jefferson’s time until the
beginning of the twentieth century, when it was com¬
pletely revised. That undertaking, begun in 1901, was
completed in 1910.
Here is the Library of Congress’s cataloguing plan as it
stands today. I have omitted the category of reference
books (encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.), that heads the
list. Under some of the main categories I have indicated
examples of what are included as subordinate classes
of works.

Philosophy Geography, including

Travel and Physical
Psychology Geography
Anthropology, and
Religion
Folklore
History, including Social sciences, including
Biography Statistics

[ 32 ]
 Libraries

Economics Language and Literature

Transportation and
Science, including
Communication
Commerce Mathematics
Finance Physics
Sociology Chemistry
Biological sciences
Associations, Societies
Socialism, Communism Medicine
Social pathology,
Criminology, Agriculture
Penology
Technology, including
Political science, Con¬
Engineering
stitutional history,
Building
Administration, and
International law Chemical technology
Law Manufactures
Education Military science, Naval
Music science

Fine arts, including Bibliography and Library

Architecture science

Under the main category of Fine Arts, the order of the

subdivisions is as follows: visual arts, architecture,
sculpture, drawing, design, illustration, painting. Under
the main category of Science, the order of the subdivi¬
sions is as follows: mathematics, mathematical logic,
computer science, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geol¬
ogy, natural history, general biology, cytology, botany,
zoology, human anatomy, physiology, microbiology. And
subordinate to the main categories of Philosophy, Psy¬
chology, and Religion are: logic, speculative philosophy,
metaphysics, epistemology, methodology, aesthetics,
ethics, mythology, and the names of various world re¬
ligions.

[ 33 ]
 Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

One comment made about the Library of Congress’s

classification scheme has said of it that “it does not pre¬
tend to be philosophically sound; it merely seeks to be
pragmatic.” That is an understatement. Nothing could be
more unsound philosophically, by reference to either
Aristotelian or Baconian principles. Jefferson’s nuclear
library may have started out to be Baconian in organiza¬
tion, but the twentieth-century revision of the original
plan departed from it in a variety of different directions.
The other major scheme for organizing libraries is that
first put into effect in 1873 by Melvil Dewey when he was
the librarian of Amherst College. This became in the
twentieth century the Dewey Decimal System. In its
original form it comprised nine major classes or catego¬
ries, which Dewey thought he had placed in a descend¬
ing order that was simply the inverse of Bacon’s ascending
order from history (memory), through poetic literature and
fiction (imagination) to science and philosophy (reason).
How far that is from being the case can be seen at once
by looking at the order in which the main categories of
the Dewey Decimal System are placed.

Bibliography and Library Public administration

science Welfare and
Philosophy Associations
Education
Psychology Commerce
Customs and Folklore
Religion
Language
Social sciences, including
Sociology Science, including
Statistics Mathematics
Political science Physics
Economics Chemistry
Law Biological sciences

[ 34 ]
 Libraries

Medicine Fine arts, including

Technology, including Architecture and Music
Engineering Literature
Agriculture
Geography
Business
Chemical technology Biography
Manufactures
History
Building

Both the Library of Congress scheme and the Dewey

Decimal System raise a host of philosophical questions
that remain unanswered. To what extent are the main
categories coordinate, or on the same level, with one an¬
other, and to what extent is there a hierarchical ordering
of things that are supraordinate and subordinate to one
another? If there is a hierarchical ordering, are the gra¬
dations of importance in an ascending or a descending
scale? Are the subdivisions of some of the main catego¬
ries appropriately named?
For example, should mathematics and logic be placed
in the company of the empirical or experimental sci¬
ences? Should religion be closely associated with philos¬
ophy? Does psychology belong with philosophy or with
the experimental sciences? Are there two quite different
disciplines that can be called psychology, one that is a
branch of philosophy and one that is an empirical sci¬
ence? And does the latter belong with the natural sci¬
ences or with the social sciences?
Such questions are plainly and completely avoided by
recourse to the alphabet in encyclopedias and in univer¬
sity catalogues. But when the bibliographical systems of
great libraries place their main categories in a nonalpha-
betical order, it is impossible to avoid raising such ques-

1 35 ]
 *

A>

Alphabetiasis: From A to Z

tions. Once the alphabet is abandoned, other principles

must be employed, and they are subject to being chal¬
lenged for their soundness and adequacy.
We must turn to the philosophers for answers to the
kinds of questions raised by our consideration of the un-
philosophical systems currently used by the great librar¬
ies of the world. Answers there are aplenty, differing from
epoch to epoch, as we will see in the chapters of Part Two
that follow. If we cannot adopt any of them without res¬
ervations or qualifications, we may at least be able to draw
from them insights and inspirations that will serve as
guidelines for anyone’s exploration of the world of
learning.

[ 36 ]
 PART TWO
THE
ORGANIZATION

CENTURY
It is necessary to call into council the
views of our predecessors in order that
we may profit by whatever is sound in
their views and avoid their errors.
Aristotle: On the Soul,
Book I, Chapter 2
.
CHAPTER 5

Greek and Roman Antiquity

Plato (428-384 B.c.)

UNLIKE many of the schemes for the organization of

knowledge that we shall come to later, the plan that Plato
gives us is pedagogical. The subjects to be studied are ar¬
ranged in the order in which they should be learned, an
order that corresponds to successive stages in the devel¬
opment of the individual from childhood and youth to
the full maturity of life’s ripest years.
The context in which Plato outlines his regimen for a
life of learning occurs in those books of the Republic in
which he lays down his plan for the education of the
guardians of the ideal state—its ruling class. It is not an
organization of the parts of knowledge as such, in which
different kinds of knowledge are related according to dif¬
ferences in their objects or subject matter. That may be
implicit in it, but explicitly it is a temporal succession,
placing first what should come first in the development
of the mind and then, through intermediate stages, com¬
ing last to what should be the crowning culmination of
the mind’s journey on the road to wisdom and truth. It
can, therefore, be regarded as a road map for the gui¬
dance of a lifetime of learning.
The terms Plato uses may not convey to the contem-
[ 39 ]
 *

Organization of Knowledge

porary reader the elements of his plan as they would be

understood today. I shall, therefore, translate his vocab¬
ulary into the more familiar terminology of our own day.
The period of childhood and youth, Plato thinks, should
be devoted to gymnastics and music—gymnastics con¬
ferring upon the body the strength and skills that render
it serviceable, and music being the cultivation of the
sensibilities, the memory, and the imagination. During the
later years of this first phase, gymnastics and music are
to be supplemented by the acquisition of skill in the use
of language, together with skill in the employment of the
mind in the processes of definition, analysis, reasoning,
and argument.
We cannot help being surprised by the fact that Plato
assigns the first twenty years of life to this first phase of
learning. But we must remember that this program is in¬
tended for the guardian or ruling class, persons with am¬
ple free time, not for those who will engage much earlier
in all forms of productive labor.
The second phase, occurring in the years between
twenty and thirty, turns the mind away from the world
of the senses and toward the intelligible realm that is
constituted by the objects of mathematical thought and
the demonstrations of mathematical science—the realm
of numbers and figures, of ratios and proportions.
Plato’s names for these elements in his order of learn¬
ing are arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Of
these, the first two are familiar terms for us. But for Plato,
astronomy and music in this second phase are also
mathematical sciences, the one dealing with the mathe¬
matical formulation of the celestial motions, the other with
the ratios and proportions of harmonics.
Between the ages of thirty and fifty, the guardians
slowly achieve full maturity through engagement in the
affairs of state. This is a period devoted to profiting from

[ 40 ]
 Greek and Roman Antiquity

experience in human affairs rather than one that in¬

volves the study of this or that subject matter. Their minds
have been disciplined and cultivated by the subjects
studied in the first two phases, and having been matured
and enriched by the experiences acquired in the third
phase, the guardians are now prepared for the fourth and
final phase.
It is here that the development of their minds attains
its highest elevation, their pursuit of truth reaches its
culmination, and their search for wisdom approaches its
goal. This is the phase that Plato devotes to dialectic, his
name for philosophy in its purest form—the contempla¬
tion of ideas and the grasp of first principles. Here at last
the mind has turned completely away from the world of
sensible and changing things, the realm of becoming, and
concentrates entirely on the realm of intelligible and im¬
mutable being.
One part or area of knowledge to which we today give
a major share of our attention is almost totally absent from
the Platonic scheme. Readers will have noticed that there
is no mention of the natural sciences, sciences that in¬
volve observation of sensible phenomena. The one
Platonic dialogue that deals with the formation and de¬
velopment of the cosmos, the Timaeus, includes a com¬
ment by Socrates to the effect that this cosmological
exposition is only a “likely story,” more like a myth than
a scientific demonstration.
If readers also wonder where in Plato’s scheme the good
life and the good society become matters to be thought
about and studied, they must be told that ethics and pol¬
itics are not, for Plato, sciences that occupy a place in
the organization of knowledge. Such matters are to be
thought about in the study of ideas—the idea of the good,
of happiness and virtue, of the state and justice.
One further point remains. In many of his earlier dia-

[ 41 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

logues, such as The Gorgias, and in one of his later dia¬

logues, The Sophist, Plato is concerned to differentiate
the dialectician from the rhetorician and the sophist. All
three employ the same, or very similar, methods. All three
are skilled in the same or very similar uses of the mind.
But the essential and crucial difference for Plato is that
the dialectician’s intellectual processes are governed
throughout by dedication to the truth, whereas both the
rhetorician and the sophist, often the same person, aim
only to win the argument, regardless of the truth about
the matters under consideration.

Aristotle (384—322 B.c.)

Aristotle’s organization of knowledge resembles Pla¬

to’s educational plan in three respects.
First, like Plato, Aristotle places at the outset of learn¬
ing the disciplines governing the use of language and the
operations of the mind, skills conferred by the study of
grammar and logic. The initial work in the corpus of
Aristotelian writings is called the Organon, which con¬
sists of a series of treatises that deal with the use of words,
the interpretation and analysis of statements, the rules of
reasoning, the methods of science, and the devices of ar¬
gumentation. Competence in such matters is preparatory
for all further learning. That is why it precedes all
the rest.
The second point of similarity lies in the fact that
Aristotle, like Plato, reserves the study of certain sub¬
jects for that period of life when, through the dint of much
experience, individuals have attained full maturity. He
tells us that the study of ethics and politics is not for the
young. They do not have enough experience of human
affairs to make sound judgments about what ought to be

[ 42 ]
 Greek and Roman Antiquity

sought and ought to be done in the conduct of life and

in the government of society.
The third respect in which Plato and Aristotle appear
to be of one mind, although the terms they use are quite
different, has to do with the culmination or highest level
of study in the pursuit of theoretical truth and of philo¬
sophical wisdom. This, as we have seen, goes by the name
of dialectic for Plato and is the study of ideas; whereas,
for Aristotle, this is the highest of all sciences, some¬
times called metaphysics, sometimes the first philoso¬
phy, and sometimes theology.
Each of the three names is appropriate: “metaphysics,”
inasmuch as the science in question goes beyond phys¬
ics and is concerned with being rather than change, mo¬
tion, or becoming; “first philosophy,” because it deals
with first principles, principles underlying and common
to all other branches of knowledge; and “theology,” be¬
cause its concluding chapters are concerned with God.
With these similarities acknowledged, we find many
significant differences. One is that Aristotle puts into his
scheme a whole set of sciences that Plato omits; namely,
the sciences that give us knowledge of the physical world
and of the observable phenomena of nature. In the col¬
lection of Aristotelian writings, the grammatical and log¬
ical treatises of the Organon are directly followed by
physical treatises that deal with terrestrial change, mo¬
tion, generation, and corruption, with the causes opera¬
tive in all these transformations, and with space, time,
and eternity. These are followed by a treatise that deals
with celestial motions. Next in line come a whole series
of biological works, sciences concerned with the classi¬
fication of plants and animals, with their procreation or
generation, and with their parts or vital organs.
The last in this series of works is a treatise on the soul—

[ 43 ]
 *

Organization of Knowledge

Aristotle’s psychology. It deals with the scale of living

things and with the vegetative powers of plant organ¬
isms and the sensitive and locomotive powers of animal
organisms before coming to the sensitive and intellectual
powers of human organisms. In this latter connection,
Aristotle’s psychology serves as a bridge from his phys¬
ical and biological sciences to his purely philosophical
work, his Metaphysics.
It is necessary to remember that in Aristotle’s day the
words “science” and “philosophy” did not have the
connotations they have today, which signify two quite
different kinds of inquiry and types of knowledge.
Nevertheless, it is sufficiently clear that, with the excep¬
tion of the treatise called Physics, which is more natural
philosophy than natural science, the rest, especially
Aristotle’s biological treatises, are empirical and inves¬
tigative sciences based on the observation of natural
phenomena. They represent the beginnings of empirical
science in the modern sense of that term.
In sharp contrast, Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics
are philosophical works that do not involve empirical
investigation, even though their reflective and analytical
thought is based to a certain extent on simple, common
experiences that all of us enjoy without our making any
deliberate effort to investigate.
In order to differentiate metaphysics from, and relate
it to, other sciences, Aristotle established a hierarchy of
the theoretical branches of knowledge. In this ascending
scale, the lowest rung is occupied by the natural sci¬
ences, dealing with sensible, changing things. A grada¬
tion higher is mathematics, being the study of abstract or
ideal objects. Numbers and figures exist as objects of
thought, whether or not they also have any mode of ex¬
istence in physical reality. Metaphysics stands at the

[ 44 ]
 Greek and Roman Antiquity

highest level, above mathematics. It is like mathematics

in that it deals with purely intelligible objects, but it goes
beyond mathematics in reaching to objects of thought that
can also have real existence apart from the world of sen¬
sible, material things.
A second major differentiating feature of Aristotle’s or¬
ganization of knowledge lies in his sharp distinction be¬
tween knowledge that is theoretical and to be studied for
its own sake and knowledge that is practical and to be
studied for the sake of actions to be prescribed, regu¬
lated, and judged. Physics, mathematics, and metaphys¬
ics constitute the three grades of theoretical knowledge;
ethics, economics, and politics, the three kinds of prac¬
tical science. They can be grouped together under the
general heading of moral philosophy.
There is still a third division in the classification of the
parts of knowledge that we find in Aristotle’s scheme but
not in Plato’s. To the theoretical and practical sciences,
Aristotle adds the study of the productive arts, both the
fine and the useful arts, the former productive of things
to be enjoyed for their beauty, the latter productive of
things to be of service in achieving some desired result.
Aristotle’s treatment of the fine arts, in a book entitled
Poetics, is mainly concerned with epic and dramatic lit¬
erature. His treatment of the useful arts occurs in those
scientific treatises in which he compares the produc¬
tions of art with the productions of nature.
Readers will have observed the absence, from both the
Platonic and the Aristotelian schemes, of certain parts of
knowledge that are given prominence in any modern
enumeration of subjects that deserve consideration. His¬
tory is not mentioned at all by Plato. It is mentioned by
Aristotle in a single passage in which he says that poetry
is more philosophical than history because it has a cer-

1 45 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

tain measure of universality. Poetry portrays actions that

are possible and even probable, while history must con¬
fine itself to the narration of what has actually happened
and is therefore limited to particulars.
Other disciplines of modern origin and contemporary
importance do not appear, such as sociology or anthro¬
pology in the field of the behavioral sciences, or chem¬
istry in the field of the physical sciences. While theology
has a position of high esteem for both Plato and Aristotle,
neither devote much, if any, attention to religion.

The Roman Stoics

(First and Second Centuries a.d.)

The Roman Stoics present us with a tripartite division

of knowledge that has an attractive simplicity and a
common touch. According to them, the three parts of hu¬
man knowledge are logic, physics, and ethics—the study
of the principles and laws of human thought, the study
of the principles and laws of nature, the study of the
principles and rules of human conduct.
As far as I can tell, none of the leading Stoic philoso¬
phers assigned priority or superiority to one of these three
parts as compared with the others. Nevertheless one
might, as a matter of common sense, regard the study of
logic as preparatory to the other two kinds of knowledge.
Stoic philosophy placed great emphasis on the station
that man occupies in the natural scheme of things. In
conformity with that view, one would make physics pre¬
cede ethics, as logic precedes them both. The study of
the laws of nature throws light on what is right and good
in the sphere of human conduct. To be of good will is to
act in accordance with the laws of nature.

1 46 ]
 Greek and Roman Antiquity

Augustine (354-430)
St. Augustine, being a Christian theologian as well as
a Roman philosopher, alters the picture of the realm of
learning that he inherited from his Greek predecessors.
For him, it is not speculative theology as a branch of
philosophy that stands at the apex of human knowledge,
but rather the knowledge possessed by those who have
religious faith in the revealed word of God.
In other respects, Augustine is a Platonist who adds
little to the teaching of Plato. Himself a student and
teacher of rhetoric, he lays stress on that art along with
the related arts of grammar and logic as indispensable
instruments of learning, not just as tools of communica¬
tion. He adopts Plato’s conception of dialectic as the
highest reach of philosophical thought, always, of course,
with the qualification that above it lies the truth and the
' wisdom to be found by persons of religious faith in Sacred
Scripture.

[ 47 ]
The Middle Ages

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

BOTH great Christian theologians, Aquinas and Augus¬
tine, differ in their discipleship—the former to Aristotle,
the latter to Plato. They also differ in the times in which
they lived—Aquinas at the high point of the Middle Ages,
Augustine at the very end of ancient civilization with the
fall of Rome to the barbarians from the north.
These differences account for the different views they
take of the place of theology, or what Aquinas called
Sacred Doctrine, in the organization of knowledge.
Both men place the knowledge that comes with faith
at the summit of everything that can be known; both re¬
gard such knowledge as supernatural in origin, a gift from
God through the revelation of Himself to mankind. All
other knowledge is acquired through the exercise of man’s
natural faculties, his senses and his intellect. But for
Augustine, the knowledge acquired through faith, not
through reason, is superior to scientific knowledge, which
proceeds from premises it adopts to the demonstration
of conclusions.
Aquinas, on the contrary, regards Sacred Doctrine or
sacred theology as the very epitome of science. It re-
1 48 ]
 The Middle Ages

ceives its principles or premises from the articles of

Christian faith, dogmatically declared; and proceeds
therefrom by rational processes to analyses, clarifica¬
tions, and conclusions that provide the faithful with a
better understanding of their religious beliefs. The ra¬
tional processes whereby dogmatic or sacred theology is
developed from the articles of faith call upon all the in¬
sights, distinctions, and arguments that philosophy can
make available.
That is why Aquinas not only esteems theology as the
queen of the sciences, but also praises philosophy as her
indispensable handmaiden. In this conception of philos¬
ophy as theology’s useful servant, philosophy en¬
compasses more than metaphysics and ethics. It includes
the sciences that comprise the range of natural knowledge.
Philosophy at its own twin summits in metaphysics and
ethics confers upon mankind a modicum of theoretical
and practical wisdom, but not enough for the Christian
life, either in this world or for salvation in the next. Its
deficiencies must be overcome by the superior wisdom
that comes only with faith.
What kind of training and formation must be given the
developing mind in order to prepare it to receive and
embrace that superior wisdom? Where Augustine placed
the study of grammar and rhetoric in the earliest stage of
learning, Aquinas, as Master of Arts at the University of
Paris in the thirteenth century, prepared his students for
theology by reading to them from the philosophical works
of Aristotle, and commenting on what he read, passage
by passage.
For the students to follow his commentaries, they first
had to be trained in what were then called the seven lib¬
eral arts. Although all seven had been recognized in one
form or another by Plato and Aristotle, they were not for¬
mulated as a trivium and quadrivium of studies in

[ 49 ]
 A

Organization of Knowledge

Augustine’s day. That came about in the medieval schools

and universities of a later day.
The trivium comprised the three arts of grammar, rhet¬
oric, and logic—the arts of using language correctly and
effectively and the arts of using one’s mind with preci¬
sion, accuracy, and cogency. Logic was not only an art—
a skill and a method; it was also a science that had prin¬
ciples of its own, definitions, distinctions, and axioms that
established a host of rules—the laws of thought. The same
can be said of rhetoric and grammar. They, too, were sci¬
ences as well as arts.
The remaining four of the seven liberal arts—the arts
of the quadrivium—would appear at first blush to be
mainly science: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (i.e., the
mathematical science of the spheres), and music (i.e., the
mathematical science of harmonics). But they, too, are arts,
skills of the mind in operating with numbers and figures,
ratios and proportions.
The seven liberal disciplines have their aspect as arts
in the operational skills they confer upon the mind. They
have their scientific aspect in the principles they appeal
to and the rules or conclusions they establish. As arts,
they provide us with intellectual know-how. As sci¬
ences, they give us knowledge about the intelligible ob¬
jects that the mind contemplates when it reflects upon
its own acts and its own conceptual abstractions.
s

Roger Bacon (1214-1292)

A contemporary of Thomas Aquinas, and an associate
of his at the University of Paris, to which he had come
from the University of Oxford, Roger Bacon was far more
a natural scientist than either a theologian or a metaphy¬
sician. We would, therefore, naturally expect from him a

1 50 ]
 The Middle Ages

quite different approach to the organization of knowl¬

edge and to the order of learning.
In his Opus Majus, Bacon stressed the utility of the
mathematical sciences in their application to astronomy,
optics, chronology, and other disciplines. We find what,
at this early date, may seem surprising to us—a call for
the establishment of experimental science as a method
of investigation and verification in our effort to know the
facts of nature. And, as we might expect from a Franciscan
friar, we find an acknowledgment of a close affinity be¬
tween philosophy and theology, and the elevation of
moral philosophy and theology to the apex of human
learning because it treats of man’s relation to God.
In another of Bacon’s works, of which we have only
portions left, the four extant volumes indicate an as¬
cending order of subjects to be studied. They are: first,
the arts of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic;
second, the arts of the quadrivium, beginning with the
common principles of mathematics and going on to its
special branches—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music; third, the whole range of the natural sciences, in¬
cluding optics, geography, alchemy, agriculture, medi¬
cine, and experimental science in general; and fourth,
metaphysics and morals as the crowning subjects to be
studied.

[ 51 ]
CHAPTER 7

Modern Times:
Seventeenth Century

Francis Bacon (1561—1626)

FRANCIS Bacon—Baron Verulam, Keeper of the Privy
Seal and Lord Chancellor of England—brought the tal¬
ents of a judge and administrator to the philosophical
problems he addressed. His personal physician, William
Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, said
of him that he “wrote philosophy like a lord chan¬
cellor.”
Of the two books that established Bacon’s reputation
and spread his influence—The Advancement of Learn¬
ing, published in 1605, and the Novum Organum, pub¬
lished in 1620—only the first concerns us here. It is of
interest to us but not for the reason Bacon wrote it.
Bacon’s principal aim was to take stock of the state of
human knowledge in his day and to point out the areas
in which there were deficiencies, these to be remedied
for the sake of increasing the general store of human
learning. In order to do that he had first to schematize
the whole field of knowledge, indicating its several parts
and their relationship to one another. His map or chart
of human learning, which he himself referred to as a
[ 52 ]
 Modern Times: Seventeenth Century

small globe of the intellectual world,” had greater am¬

plitude than those words imply. It was expansive and
comprehensive.
The principle he employed in his organization of
knowledge derived from the distinction of the human
faculties—memory, imagination, and reason. From the
exercise of these cognitive faculties all of the knowledge
that man possesses by natural means is obtained. But man
also has knowledge from another, a supernatural, source—
divine revelation. Bacon did not treat the latter in any
detail. Concerned with what needs to be done to ad¬
vance human learning, his differentiation of the parts of
knowledge fell principally within the first of these two
spheres.
By reference to the three faculties of memory, imagi¬
nation, and reason, Bacon distinguished history, poetry,
and philosophy. History deals with the memorable past
that has become a matter of record. Poetry for Bacon cov¬
ers all the products of our imagination—the whole of im¬
aginative literature, not just lyrics in verse, but all forms
of narrative fiction, both dramatic and epic (which we now
call plays and novels), whether written in prose or
in verse.
As Bacon used the word “philosophy” it had a much
broader connotation than it has today. It included all the
forms of knowledge obtained by reason’s reflections on
human experience, aided in some instances by experi¬
mental investigation or inquiry. It took into account what
we would call the sciences as well as what we would call
the branches of philosophy. It also included the techno¬
logical or productive results of experimental science and
the various arts that involved other applications of
science.
The fact, pointed out by Bacon’s critics, that these three
main parts of human knowledge do not stem exclusively

1 53 ]
 *

Organization of Knowledge

from memory, imagination, and reason, does not, in my

judgment, undermine his controlling insight. Of course,
reason and imagination, as well as memory, enter into
historical knowledge, both on the side of historical re¬
search and on the side of historical narration. But with¬
out the operation of memory, there would be no history.
Similarly, memory and imagination enter into the phil¬
osophical or scientific enterprise in all its forms, but
without the exercise of reason, there would be no phi¬
losophy or science. Reason and memory, too, play a part
in the compositions of poetry, but without the play of
imagination there would be no imaginative literature.
The point on which Bacon can be challenged and per¬
haps also corrected is the inclusion of poetry or imagi¬
native literature as one of the three parts of human
knowledge. That it is an essential component of human
culture, and of learning in the broadest sense of that term,
lies beyond question. But if knowledge is used in a nar¬
rower sense than learning, if it is used for what claims
to be true of reality, where such claims are verifiable or
falsifiable, then history and philosophy or science be¬
long in the domain of knowledge, poetry does not.
On the other hand, it can be said that truth is more
ample, that it includes poetic as well as scientific, phil¬
osophical, and historical truth. It includes truth about the
possible as well as truth about the actual. On that basis,
Bacon’s inclusion of poetry along with history and phi¬
losophy in the domain of knowledge can be justified.
History, according to Bacon, has four subdivisions. The
terms he used to name them need some explanation for
contemporary readers. Under natural history, he in¬
cluded not only what we would mean by that term but
also the histories of the arts and sciences. Under civil
history, he included biographies and chronicles as well
as the history of political institutions and affairs. Under

[ 54 ]
 Modern Times: Seventeenth Century

ecclesiastical history, he included the history of the

church and other religious institutions, practices, and
events. Under literary history, he included what we would
call social and cultural, as contrasted with narrowly po¬
litical, history.
This classification of the subdivisions of history raises
some questions. Does not natural history, in the sense in
which that term is now used for an account of changes
in the realm of the phenomena of nature, belong with the
natural sciences rather than with political and cultural
history? Should not ecclesiastical history, if it is strictly
human and not divine knowledge (i.e., not based on
Sacred Scriptures or divine revelation), be an element in
cultural history? In any case, it is clear that what Bacon
meant by ecclesiastical history was concerned only with
the institutions and events of the Christian religion.
Nothing could have been further from his mind than what
we mean by the comparative study of all human reli¬
gions.
Finally we come to philosophy, the third main divi¬
sion of human learning or knowledge. Here the primary
subdivision separates the consideration of the most gen¬
eral principles of all knowledge from the conclusions of
special forms of inquiry. This gives us, on the one hand,
what Bacon called philosophia prima, which corre¬
sponds in part, but only in part, to what the ancients
called metaphysics. The special disciplines or modes of
inquiry are then further subdivided according to the ob¬
jects with which they are concerned—God, nature, and
man. Thus we get a threefold subdivision of the special
disciplines into 1) natural, as distinguished from sacred,
theology; 2) natural philosophy; and 3) human phi¬
losophy.
Once again, it is necessary to translate Bacon’s nomen¬
clature into terms more familiar and recognizable to the

[ 55 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

contemporary world. What Bacon called natural theol¬

ogy, we would refer to as philosophical theology. For the
ancients, this would have constituted the concluding
chapters of a treatise on metaphysics. What Bacon called
natural philosophy, we would separate into the philos¬
ophy of nature on the one hand, and all the natural sci¬
ences on the other. What Bacon called human philosophy,
he subdivided into one part that dealt with human beings
as individuals, and another part that dealt with human
beings in aggregate or in association—with human society.
In the part concerned with human individuals, Bacon
separated the disciplines concerned with the human body,
such as medicine, cosmetics, and cooking, from the dis¬
ciplines concerned with the human mind and human
conduct, which we would call psychology and ethics or
moral philosophy.
In treating the part concerned with human beings in
association or in society, Bacon used terms for disci¬
plines that we would understand as sociology, econom¬
ics, and politics (or perhaps as political philosophy) on
the one hand, and as the social and behavioral sciences
on the other hand. This area he regarded as highly defi¬
cient in his own day.
It must be noted that Bacon named metaphysics and
mathematics along with physics as the three main
branches of natural philosophy. But, as we have already
observed, metaphysics as understood by the ancients in¬
cluded what Bacon called philosophia prima and also
what he called natural or philosophical theology.
An even more questionable point is Bacon’s inclusion
of mathematics as a subdivision of natural philosophy.
Mathematics as understood by the ancients stood apart
from physics, as did metaphysics. Neither provided
knowledge of natural phenomena. Only physics deals with
the realm of becoming—matter in motion and all the

[ 56 ]
 Modern Times: Seventeenth Century

phenomena of change. While we today recognize the

manifold applications of mathematics in physics and in
other natural sciences, we also regard it as a discipline
quite distinct from those investigative—empirical or ex¬
perimental—sciences. Mathematics is neither empirical
nor experimental.
Under human philosophy Bacon included what he
called the intellectual arts—arts that use the intellect for
one purpose or another. In place of what the ancients re¬
ferred to as the liberal arts and the Middle Ages catego¬
rized as the linguistic arts (grammar, rhetoric, and logic)
and the mathematical arts (arithmetic, geometry, music,
and astronomy), Bacon treated all the intellectual arts as
if they were branches of rhetoric and subsumed there¬
under both logic and grammar. He entirely omitted the
mathematical arts.
Bacon’s concern with logic concentrated mainly on the
art of discovery, or what we might call the methodology
of the empirical or experimental sciences. In this respect
he parted company with the traditional conception of the
sphere of logic, which is based on Aristotle’s Organon—
his treatise on the subject. That is why Bacon called his
treatment of the same subject a Novum Organum—a new
logic or methodology.

Thomas Hobbes (1588—1679)

The book by Thomas Hobbes in which we find his
scheme for the organization of knowledge and his map
of human learning is the Leviathan, published in 1651.
That treatise was primarily a work in political philoso¬
phy dealing with the state and man in relation to the state.
But in the opening section of the work (which concen¬
trates on the nature of man), Chapter 9, following chap¬
ters that deal with the operations of the human mind, is

[ 57 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

entitled “Of the Several Subjects of Knowledge.” Quot¬

ing it in its entirety may be the most useful way of intro¬
ducing the reader to the map or chart of learning that
Hobbes presented.

There are of knowledge two kinds, whereof one is knowl¬

edge of fact; the other, knowledge of the consequence of one
affirmation to another. The former is nothing else but sense and
memory, and is absolute knowledge; as when we see a fact
doing, or remember it done; and this is the knowledge re¬
quired in a witness. The latter is called science, and is condi¬
tional; as when we know that: if the figure shown be a circle,
then any straight line through the center shall divide it into
two equal parts. And this is the knowledge required in a phi¬
losopher; that is to say, of him that pretends to reasoning.
The register of knowledge of fact is called history, whereof
there be two sorts: one called natural history, which is the his¬
tory of such facts, or effects of Nature, as have no dependence
on man’s will; such as are the histories of metals, plants, ani¬
mals, regions, and the like. The other is civil history, which is
the history of the voluntary actions of men in Common¬
wealths.
The registers of science are such books as contain the dem¬
onstrations of consequences of one affirmation to another; and
are commonly called books of philosophy; whereof the sorts
are many, according to the diversity of thematter; and may be
divided in such manner as I have divided them in the follow¬
ing table. . . .

The table referred to presents a schematic diagram, the

overall heading of which is “SCIENCE . . . which is
called also PHILOSOPHY.” Under this heading, the ma¬
jor division is that between natural philosophy and civil
philosophy, or politics.
Natural philosophy includes, first of all, a group of
disciplines, the topmost of which is the most general in

[ 58 ]
 Modern Times: Seventeenth Century

its consideration of the principles underlying all other

disciplines. This, Hobbes, like Bacon, called philosophia
prima. The other disciplines in this group, less general,
include mathematics, cosmography, and mechanics.
Mathematics is then subdivided into arithmetic and ge¬
ometry; cosmography into astronomy and geography; and
mechanics into engineering, architecture, and navi¬
gation.
What is surprising about this is not that philosophia
prima and mathematics are here sharply separated from
the second main group of disciplines under natural phi¬
losophy, but rather that astronomy and engineering are
separated from physics, which is the name that Hobbes
used to designate the second main group.
In that second group we find not only such special
disciplines as meteorology, astrology, and optics, but also
music. In addition, and even more surprising, we find
ethics, poetry, rhetoric, logic, and jurisprudence.
In all the respects that I have called surprising, Hobbes
departs not only from Bacon’s more traditional scheme,
but also even more so from the maps of knowledge and
learning that were dominant in antiquity and the Middle
Ages. Hobbes entirely omits theology from his scheme of
things, not only excluding divine philosophy, or sacred
theology, but also philosophical or natural theology. His
subsuming of ethics or moral philosophy under the branch
of natural philosophy he calls physics is as unintelligi¬
ble as his inclusion under the same heading of poetry and
of logic and rhetoric. History is nowhere to be found in
this map of learning.
The second main subdivision of science or philoso¬
phy, which Hobbes called politics, or civil philosophy as
distinguished from natural philosophy, deals, of course,
with the institutions of the state, with the rights and du-

[ 59 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

ties of the sovereign and the rights and duties of sub¬

jects. But here we are impelled to ask why ethics (which
certainly treats of rights and duties) and jurisprudence
(which Hobbes called the science of the just and unjust)
should be so sharply separated from politics, appearing
to have no relation to its concern with rights and duties.
Even though Book I of the Leviathan, in its treatment
of human nature and the operations of the mind, deals
with matters that we would consider to be psychologi¬
cal, psychology is omitted from Hobbes’s scheme; and so,
too, is economics, even though wealth and property have
obvious relevance to the subjects treated under the head
of politics or civil philosophy.

John Locke (1632-1704)

Book IV of Locke’s great Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, published in 1689, contains a chapter
(numbered XXI) entitled “Of the Division of the Sciences.”
Its opening paragraph sets forth a threefold division:
the first is concerned with the nature of things and is
called physics or natural philosophy; the second is con¬
cerned with human conduct and is called ethics; and the
third is concerned with the use of language and is called
either the doctrine of signs or logic.
As compared with the organization of knowledge and
the mapping of the sphere of learning advanced by Bacon
and Hobbes, Locke’s tripartite scheme is both simplistic
and inadequate. That the three disciplines constituting his
scheme represent important and distinct disciplines can¬
not be questioned. But what about poetry, history, poli¬
tics, mathematics, metaphysics, and theology? They
cannot be fitted into his scheme.
It is also important to note that Locke adds nothing to

[ 60 ]
 Modern Times: Seventeenth Century

the tripartite scheme that the Roman Stoics thought suf¬

ficient when they divided all of human learning into logic,
physics, and ethics.
The picture changes remarkably as we turn now from
the seventeenth to the eighteenth and nineteenth cen¬
turies.

[ 61 ]
CHAPTER 8

Modern Times:
Eighteenth Century

Denis Diderot (1713—1784) and

Jean d’Alembert (1717-1783)
PUBLISHED in the years 1751 to 1780, the French
Encyclopedie, comprising thirty-five volumes, not only
undertook to report the state of knowledge in the various
arts and sciences, but also to put some order and system
into the organization of knowledge. Its editors, Diderot
and d’Alembert, were greatly influenced by Francis Bacon,
departing from his scheme only in one major respect: They
ignored his distinction between human and divine
knowledge, including sacred theology under philoso¬
phy.
In his own article on encyclopedias, Diderot explained
that the word “encyclopedie” signified the coverage of
all parts of knowledge, encircled systematically and
comprehensively. He used Bacon’s tripartite division of
all the parts of knowledge according to their depen¬
dence, respectively, on memory, imagination, and rea¬
son. Consequently, history, poetry, and philosophy
constitute the three main categories under which knowl¬
edge or learning is to be organized. Diderot presented this

[ 62 ]
 Modern Times: Eighteenth Century

scheme in his Prospectus for the Encyclopedic. D’Alem¬

bert adopted it with slight changes in the Preliminary
Discourse that he wrote for the first volume.
History they subdivided into sacred, civil, and natural.
Poetry comprised three kinds: narrative, dramatic, and
parabolic—the first concerned with an imaginary past, the
second with an imaginary present, and the third with
matters abstract or theoretical. But they also extended the
word “poetry” to include all the fine arts—music, paint¬
ing, engraving, and sculpture.
When they came to philosophy, they departed slightly
from Bacon’s order of the sciences. Bacon had proceeded
from God to nature to man. The French encyclopedists
reversed the position of nature and man, putting man first
and nature second, but like Bacon they gave first place
to ontology or metaphysics, or what Bacon had called
philosophia prima—first philosophy.
For the French encyclopedists, the sciences of man in¬
cluded what we would call psychology, the sciences of
communication (the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and
logic), and morals or ethics, including here politics, eco¬
nomics, and jurisprudence. They placed mathematics side
by side with physics among the sciences of nature. Un¬
der the head of physics, they placed astronomy, meteor¬
ology, cosmology, botany, mineralogy, and zoology; and
under the head of chemistry, chemistry proper, metal¬
lurgy, alchemy, and natural magic. They divided math¬
ematics into pure and applied, including under the latter
optics, acoustics, and the theory of probability.
Antoine-Augustin Cournot, a French philosopher of
their time, criticized the encyclopedists for adopting
Bacon’s ordering of the parts of knowledge, which did
not take into account the advances in scientific research
that had been made in the 145 years since Bacon’s Ad¬
vancement of Learning was published. Natural history

1 63 ]
 s

Organization of Knowledge

should no longer be separated from the natural sciences

in Cournot’s view. Botany should be more closely asso¬
ciated with zoology. The theory of probability should be¬
long in the sphere of pure mathematics, rather than along
with optics and acoustics in the sphere of applied math¬
ematics.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Among Kant’s predecessors, the philosophers Gott¬
fried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff exercised the
greatest influence upon him. In the year 1700 Leibniz
produced a scheme that was based on the organization
of the curriculum in the German universities of his day:
theology, jurisprudence, medicine, intellectual philoso¬
phy, mathematics, physics, civil or political history, and
literary history, or the history of the arts.
Wolff made a threefold division of knowledge into em¬
pirical sciences, mathematics, and philosophy or the ra¬
tional sciences. He divided the empirical sciences into
cosmology and psychology; mathematics, into pure and
applied; and philosophy, or the rational sciences, into the
speculative and the practical. Under the speculative sci¬
ences he placed ontology, or philosophic! prima, cosmol¬
ogy, and psychology; under the practical, logic, ethics,
politics, and technology.
We find in Kant’s works two somewhat different ex¬
plicit schemes for the organization of knowledge. One
occurs in the Preface to the second edition of his Critique
of Pure Reason, published in 1787. There Kant separates
logic or methodology from all other branches of knowl¬
edge, and the latter he divides into the theoretical and
the practical. In so doing, he appears to be following Ar¬
istotle, as he does also in his threefold division of the

[ 64 ]
 Modern Times: Eighteenth Century

theoretical sciences into physics, mathematics, and me¬

taphysics.
In his Preface to a later work, the Fundamental Prin¬
ciples of the Metaphysics of Ethics, Kant concerns him¬
self only with philosophy or what he calls “rational
knowledge.’’ This he divides into one formal branch,
which consists of logic, and two material branches, which
consist of physics, or natural philosophy, and ethics, or
moral philosophy.
Neither of the Kantian schemes so far presented rep¬
resent what lies at the heart of his philosophical ap¬
proach to the whole realm of human knowledge or
learning. The most fundamental point for Kant was the
differentiation, following Wolff, of the empirical from the
rational disciplines. These can be identified with the
natural sciences on the one hand, and with mathematics
and the branches of philosophy on the other.
However, in one chapter of his Critique of Pure Reason,
entitled “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” Kant ex¬
plains that the differentiation of the natural sciences from
mathematics turns on the distinction between concepts
that have some derivation from experience and concepts
that are purely constructions of the intellect.
In the sphere of knowledge that employs concepts de¬
rived from experience, Kant’s most fundamental distinc¬
tion is between those that are employed in synthetic
judgments a posteriori and those that are employed in
synthetic judgments a priori.
For Kant, the judgment that 7 + 5 = 12 is synthetic, not
analytic: It is not, as others think it to be, a direct con¬
sequence of the definition of the terms employed. It is
also a priori, not a posteriori—not based on any process
of empirical investigation or research.
What we would call the empirical sciences, natural or

[ 65 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

social, would consist for Kant of all the disciplines in

which the judgments made are not only synthetic but also
a posteriori—the results of empirical investigation or re¬
search. Contrasted with these are what Kant called the
disciplines of rational science, or the branches of philos¬
ophy, all of which are constituted by judgments both
synthetic and a priori, in no way dependent on empiri¬
cal investigation or research.
Accordingly, such terms as physics or psychology have
for Kant a double use. On the one hand, there are empir¬
ical physics and empirical psychology, branches of nat¬
ural science. On the other hand, there are rational physics
and rational psychology, branches of what Kant called
transcendental philosophy. Kant at first appears to be
following Aristotle in making physics, mathematics, and
metaphysics the three main branches of speculative
knowledge, but his critical philosophy rejects metaphys¬
ics as having any claim to validity among the branches
of speculative thought. This rejection arose from his in¬
sistence that no synthetic a priori judgments are possible
for the existence of God, the freedom of the will, and the
immortality of the soul. How to affirm the existence of
God, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul,
Kant thought are the three main problems of meta¬
physics.
We are thus left with mathematics, rational physics (or
a philosophy of nature), rational psychology (or a philos¬
ophy of mind), and rational anthropology (or a philoso¬
phy of man), in addition to all the empirical sciences
(which also include physics, psychology, and anthropol¬
ogy)- But that is not all; for in the sphere of practical as
contrasted with speculative knowledge, Kant stoutly de¬
fends the validity of ethics, or moral philosophy, as a ra¬
tional discipline, as well as the validity of politics, or the
science of right—rational jurisprudence.
 Modern Times: Eighteenth Century

Finally, with Kant there comes into a special promi¬

nence a new discipline, which has come to be called
epistemology: the theory of knowledge itself. This is the
heart of Kant’s own critical philosophy, his critique of
pure reason. Though two English philosophers, John
Locke and David Hume, preceded Kant in an examina¬
tion of the grounds for certifying or validating what is
genuine knowledge as distinct from mere opinion, the
prominence of epistemology in modern philosophical
thought stems from him.
It might be more to the point to say the predominance
of epistemology rather than its prominence, since, in the
centuries following Kant, modern epistemology has not
only tended to reject metaphysics as a valid branch of
knowledge, but has also replaced metaphysics as the
reigning regulative discipline.

[ 67 ]
CHAPTER 9

Modern Times:
Nineteenth Century

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834)

LIKE the French encyclopedists of the century before,
Coleridge was deeply impressed by the Baconian scheme
for the organization of knowledge. He did not follow it,
however, as closely as the encyclopedists did. The table
of arrangement he drew up in 1817 for his projected
Encyclopedia Metropolitana was presented in his “Trea¬
tise on Method,” which was published in the first vol¬
ume of that encyclopedia in the following year. Coleridge’s
classification and ordering of the branches of knowledge
was somewhat altered later by the publishers of his
encyclopedia.
His table of arrangement was comprised of four divi¬
sions. Of these the first consisted of the pure sciences,
subdivided into the formal and the real. The formal sci¬
ences consisted of universal grammar or philology, logic,
and mathematics. The real sciences, or the sciences of
reality, consisted of metaphysics, morals, and theology.
Coleridge subdivided the second main division into the
mixed and applied sciences. The mixed sciences con¬
sisted of mechanics, hydraulics, pneumatics, optics, and

[ 68 ]
 Modern Times: Nineteenth Century

astronomy. The applied sciences were broken down into

five subdivisions: 1) the branches of experimental phi¬
losophy—magnetism, electricity, chemistry, light, heat,
color, and meteorology; 2) the fine arts—poetry, paint¬
ing, sculpture, and architecture; 3) the useful arts—agri¬
culture, commerce, and manufactures; 4) natural history—
physiology, crystallography, geology, mineralogy, bo¬
tany, and zoology; and 5) the applications of natural his¬
tory—anatomy, surgery, materia medica, pharmacy, and
medicine.
Articles treating the first two of Coleridge’s main di¬
visions of knowledge were to occupy the first eight vol¬
umes of the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, with articles on
subjects in the second division filling six of these eight
volumes.
The historical, biographical, and geographical articles
that constituted Coleridge’s third main division were
planned for the next eight volumes. Remaining for the last
eight volumes were the kind of articles that we would
include in a lexicon or in a gazetteer, the entries in which
would be alphabetically arranged, the whole to be fol¬
lowed by an alphabetical index.
The Encyclopedia Metropolitana was never completed
according to Coleridge’s plan, which employed a com¬
bination of systematic and alphabetical principles for the
organization of an encyclopedia, the first eight volumes
being purely topical or systematic in the arrangement of
its articles, the last twenty being alphabetical.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in its first edi¬
tion (1769) was purely alphabetical and has remained so
in all of its fifteen editions, has survived for more than
two hundred years. In contrast, the partly topical Ency¬
clopedia Metropolitana was an impressive failure. It did
not long remain in print. Probably it failed because the
topical arrangement of its articles on the major arts and

1 69 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

sciences did not serve the purposes of readers who wanted

to use an encyclopedia solely as a reference work and not
as a systematic survey of all the major fields of learning.
Nevertheless, subsequent editors of alphabetical ency¬
clopedias, including Britannica, were influenced by
Coleridge’s main categories for the branches of knowl¬
edge.
In the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries,
encyclopedia editors used such categories to classify the
articles they sought from their contributors, even though,
when the articles came in, they placed them in a purely
alphabetical order.
An example of this is to be found in the Classified Table
of Contents of the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Bri¬
tannica (a copy of which can be found in Chapter 2).
Unlike Coleridge’s chart of categories, which was not al¬
phabetically arranged, Britannica’s Classified Table of
Contents was purely alphabetical.

Andre Marie Ampere (1775-1836)

Toward the close of his life, the French scientist-
philosopher Ampere published a treatise, the title of
which translated into English runs as follows: An essay
on the philosophy of the sciences; or an analytical ex¬
position of a natural classification of the whole of hu¬
man knowledge.
Therein the branches of knowledge were ordered in a
manner that has a typically modern ring: mathematics,
physics and other natural sciences, medicine, the branches
of philosophy, literature and pedagogy, ethnology, and the
political sciences.
Expanded somewhat, mathematics for Ampere con¬
sisted of arithmetic and geometry; under or associated

[ 70 ]
 Modern Times: Nineteenth Century

with physics were mechanics, kinematics, dynamics, as¬

tronomy, geology, botany, zoology, and agriculture; med¬
icine carried with it pharmacy and hygenics.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

According to Auguste Comte, progress in human
learning proceeds through three stages. The first stage is
that of theology, or what for Comte amounts to mythol¬
ogy or superstition. The second stage is that of meta¬
physics, or speculative philosophy. This for Comte
consists of abstract speculation and unfounded theory.
Finally, in the modern era, we reach at last the stage of
empirically certified valid knowledge, represented by the
positive sciences.
It was this picture of the history of human thought that
branded Comte as the founder of positivism, which has
taken many forms in the nineteenth and twentieth cen¬
turies and is especially prevalent in our own day.
The word “positive” characterizes all genuine knowl¬
edge as distinct from mere opinion. It is knowledge based
on fact. It is not speculation or theorizing, up in the air
with no feet on the ground. It is empirical or experimen¬
tal in method, starting from observed facts and returning
to observed facts for verification. It deals only with ob¬
servable phenomena.
These strictures make it difficult to understand how
Comte justified including mathematics along with the
empirical or experimental sciences. Pure mathematics is
neither an empirical nor an experimental science. Comte’s
only ground for doing so was his recognition of the role
that mathematics played in the development of the nat¬
ural sciences, especially celestial and terrestrial mechan¬
ics, the first branches of mathematical physics to emerge

1 71 ]
 Organization of Knowledge

in modern times. Comte was obviously unaware that the

Alexandrian scientists of antiquity, in both astronomy and
mechanics, were also mathematical physicists.
Comte’s sixfold division of the positive sciences is or¬
dered according to the degree of simplicity and com¬
plexity of the phenomena being investigated, and also the
relative abstractness and concreteness of the objects being
studied. This gives us the following arrangement of all
the disciplines that exhaustively constitute the domain
of genuine learning: mathematics, astronomy, physics,
chemistry, biology and physiology, and sociology, or what
Comte also called social philosophy.
Comte’s further subdivision of these six main depart¬
ments of scientific knowledge need not be considered
here, in view of the tremendous advances in science since
his day, and the vast proliferation of specialized disci¬
plines under each of his main headings. Of much greater
significance are the omissions or eliminations from the
field of learning that characterize Comte’s positivist ap¬
proach to the organization of knowledge.
First of all is the elimination on principle not only of
theoretical or speculative philosophy (metaphysics, the
philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of mind), but
also of practical philosophy (ethics and politics). Then
there is the omission, with no reasons given, of history,
both political and cultural. Finally, there is no mention
of poetry and of other fine arts, nor is there any consid¬
eration of the traditional liberal arts of grammar, rheto¬
ric, and logic.
Under sociology or social philosophy, Comte included
such disciplines as political science, political economy,
and social but not physical anthropology; and he would
appear to have no place for empirical psychology, both
human and animal, as a behavioral science.

[ 72 ]
 Modern Times: Nineteenth Century

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

Significantly different from the other modern schemes
for the organization of knowledge we have so far exam¬
ined is Dilthey’s division of learning into two major fields:
1) the natural sciences, both those concerned with non¬
human phenomena and those concerned with man’s
mental processes and behavior; and 2) the humanities,
which, for Dilthey, included history and biography, eco¬
nomics, politics, and law, moral philosophy or ethics,
religion, poetry, architecture, and music.
This basic twofold division is probably more accu¬
rately expressed by the German words “Naturwissen-
schaften” and “Geisteswissenschaften.” The second of
Dilthey’s main divisions—poorly designated by the
English word “humanities”—is further subdivided ac¬
cording to the method or manner in which the objects
considered are studied. On the one hand, there is the
historical approach to the study of economics and poli¬
tics, or of man’s moral and social life. On the other hand,
there is the systematic approach to the same subjects, in
such disciplines as economics, sociology, and psychol¬
ogy, or in moral and political philosophy. So, too, poetry
can be studied historically, or it can be approached sys¬
tematically in literary criticism.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Spencer, like Comte, proposed a systematic ordering of
what he regarded in his day as acknowledged sciences
or disciplines. Unlike Comte, he was not a positivist. He
did not exclude from the field of learning the whole of
philosophy, for he himself attempted to make contribu¬
tions to moral philosophy or ethics. Nor did he exclude

[ 73 ]
 *

Organization of Knowledge

disciplines that were partly scientific and partly philo¬

sophical. However, like Comte, he gave little or no con¬
sideration to history or poetry and other arts.
His principle for ordering the sciences was in terms of
their relative abstractness or concreteness. Thus he placed
logic and mathematics first as purely abstract disci¬
plines. Next came mechanics, physics, and chemistry as
sciences both abstract and concrete. These were fol¬
lowed by the purely concrete sciences of astronomy, ge¬
ology, biology, psychology, and sociology.
Both Comte’s and Spencer’s schemes for the organiza¬
tion of knowledge have the aspect of museum pieces.
They have more interest as matters of historical record
than as significant for us today. Unlike the map or chart
of all human learning laid down by Francis Bacon, and
adopted with modifications by the French encycloped¬
ists and others, the schemes of Comte and Spencer are
not sufficiently comprehensive. The principles they em¬
ploy in drawing up these schemes are much more chal¬
lengeable than those employed by Bacon.

[ 74 ]
PART THREE
TEMPORARY
 \
y*

\
*

\
CHAPTER 10

A Twentieth-Century
Proposal

A SURVEY of attempts to map or chart the realm of

learning would be incomplete if some characteristically
twentieth-century efforts were not included. In this and
the next two chapters I will give a brief account of them
and explain why they do not deliver the guidance that is
needed.
At the beginning of this century, a number of books
appeared that addressed themselves to the problem of
classifying library books in terms of the organization of
knowledge. Three were written by Americans: Classifi¬
cation, Theoretical and Practical, by E. C. Richardson in
1930; The Organization of Knowledge and the System of
the Sciences, by H. E. Bliss in 1929; and The Organiza¬
tion of Knowledge in Libraries, also by Bliss, 1933. It must
be added that these American efforts were influenced by
an earlier British book on library arrangement—Manual
of Classification and Shelf Arrangement, by J. D. Brown,
published in 1898.
Richardson’s scheme was governed by his explicitly
stated principle that “the order of the sciences is the or¬
der of things’’ and by his declaration that “the order of
things is lifeless, living, human, and superhuman,” thus
going from the sciences of the inanimate to the sciences
[ 77 1
 THE ORDER OF THE PEDAGOGIC THE LOGICAL
NATURE ORDER ORDER

Substance, Matter, Science and Science and

Reality Philosophy Philosophy

Media (aetherial, Natural Science Natural Science

electronic, and
other) Applied Mechan¬ Physics
ics,
Energy, Relations Engineering Chemistry

Physical Actions Chemical Science Special Natural

and States Sciences
Astronomy
Chemical Elements Astronomy
and Actions Geology
Geology
Bodies, Structures Biology, Botany,
(inorganic) Zoology Biology

Organisms Anthropology Anthropology

Mind Psychology Psychology

Societies, Commu¬ Social Sciences, Education

nities, Ethnic Sociology
Groups, Social Sociology
Groups Aesthetics,
Technologies Arts (fine, useful,
recreative)
Philology
Philology

[ 78 ]
 A Twentieth-Century Proposal

dealing with living organisms, and then to the sciences

or disciplines dealing with human life and society, leav¬
ing religion or theology to the last.
While the system of the positive sciences proposed by
Bliss closely resembles that proposed by Auguste Comte
(mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropol¬
ogy, and sociology), his overall view of the field of learn¬
ing included much more than that list of the positive
sciences. It included philosophy, history, geography, re¬
ligion, politics, and the fine arts.
For Bliss, the four basic areas of human knowledge
consist of philosophy, science, history, technology, and
the arts. His book on the organization of knowledge con¬
tains a number of synoptic tables, constructed differ¬
ently on the basis of different principles. One is
constructed in accordance with the order of nature; an¬
other sets forth the pedagogical order in which things
should be studied; and still another, the logical order of
the subject matters to be studied.
In my judgment, these three synoptic tables are of suf¬
ficient interest to be reproduced in part. Readers need only
glance at these to perceive quickly their general tenor.
In 1970, Bliss revised the system of bibliographic clas¬
sification that he first presented in 1933. Here is a syn¬
opsis of its main headings:

Philosophy (its branches and its History

history, both Eastern and
Western) Religion

Logic Social Welfare

Mathematics Political Science

[ 79 ]
 V

Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

Statistics and Probability Public Administration

Physical Science and Technology Law

Biological Sciences Economics

Anthropology Finance, Banking, and

Insurance
Medicine
Technology and Useful
Psychology Arts

Education Fine Arts

Social Sciences Philology

The foregoing system of bibliographic classification

(here presented with some abbreviation) must be con¬
sidered in its own terms and in the light of its own pur¬
poses. It is a scheme for putting books on the shelves of
libraries in an orderly fashion, better in some respects than
either the Dewey Decimal System or that of the Library
of Congress. It is certainly more instructive than the purely
alphabetical ordering of departments in a college or uni¬
versity catalogue, or of the articles in an alphabetically
organized encyclopedia. However, it falls far short of the
enlightenment or understanding that should result from
a map or chart of learning based on explicitly declared
philosophical principles.
Such maps or charts existed in antiquity and in the
Middle Ages (see chapters 5 and 6), and also in modern
times, especially in the works of Bacon, Kant, and Col¬
eridge (see chapters 7, 8, and 9). However, none of these

[ 80 ]
 A Twentieth-Century Proposal

are wholly acceptable to us or appropriate for us in the

twentieth century.
They contain some insights and some distinctions that
still have relevance for us and provide us with some
guidance. But the task of mapping or charting the whole
sphere of knowledge and the realm of human learning
remains to be done in a manner that is acceptable and
appropriate today.
Two steps in that direction, in both of which I have
been involved, deserve to be considered before I under¬
take to tackle the task that remains. One is the construc¬
tion of the Propaedia, or Outline of Knowledge, published
along with the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica in 1974, and improved in the 1985 edition.
The other is the Syntopicon, which was an index of the
great ideas, published along with Great Books of the
Western World in 1952. These two steps will be reported
in chapters 11 and 12 to follow.

[ 81 ]
The Propaedia

DURING the twenty-five years between 1949 and 1974,

when Robert M. Hutchins was chairman of the Board of
Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the most insis¬
tent and vexatious problem discussed at board meetings
was the choice between an alphabetical and a topical or¬
ganization for the next edition.
In its first fourteen editions the Britannica had been
alphabetically organized in a single series of article titles
from A to Z. The first edition in 1768 did, however, make
a clear typographical distinction between the short en¬
tries in that one alphabetical series, entries having purely
informational content, and the long articles or essays that
provided expositions of the major fields of knowledge or
learning.
Throughout the 1950s and in the early 1960s, the Board
of Editors was charged with planning a new Britan¬
nica—a fifteenth edition. Faced with that task, its mem¬
bers, in session after session, debated the merits of a
topical as opposed to an alphabetical arrangement of ar¬
ticles.
At that time, the only topically organized encyclope¬
dia we could consult in order to weigh the pros and cons
of the issue was the Encyclopedic frangaise. Its table of
 The Propaedia

contents is worth examining here as background for what

is to follow.
As originally projected, its twenty-one volumes were
to bear the following titles.

I. Thought, Language, Mathematics

II. Problems of Physics
III. The Universe and the Planet Earth
IV. Life
V. Living Beings
VI. The Human Being
VII. The Human Species
VIII. The Stages of Humanity
IX. The Legacy of the Past to the Present
X. The Modern State
XI. The States of the World
XII. Economic Organization (1)
XIII. Economic Organization (2)
XIV. Well-being and Culture
XV. Intellectual Life and Education
XVI. Art and Literature (1)
XVII. Art and Literature (2)
XVIII. Religion and Philosophies
XIX. Man, Earth, Machine
XX. Bibliography and List of Proper Names
XXI. Alphabetical List of Subjects

It will be noted at once that, although history is treated

at considerable length, neither biography nor geography
receive explicit treatment. Volume I, after a general in¬
troduction, is divided into three parts: 1) the evolution
of thought, primitive and logical; 2) language, dealing with
the structure of linguistic data, the types of languages, and

1 83 ]
 *

Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

alphabets and writing systems; and 3) the various

branches of mathematics.
Volume II has three parts, the first dealing with me¬
chanics, electromagnetics, and thermodynamics; the sec¬
ond, with the atomic sciences; the third with relativity,
wave mechanics, radiation, and nuclear physics.
Volume III, dealing with the heavens and the Earth,
devotes the section on the heavens to the Solar System,
the sun and other stars, the galaxies, and the problems
of cosmic evolution. The section on the Earth treats the
terrestrial globe, the crust of the Earth and its topogra¬
phy.
Volume IV is divided into five parts: 1) the origins of
life; 2) the physical structure and chemical composition
of living matter; 3) the organization of living beings; 4)
cellular activities; and 5) the sustenance and survival of
animals.
Volume V deals first with flora and fauna, plants and
animals; and then in a second part treats the distribution
of living beings.
Volume VI considers first the physical life of man in
normal health; and then, in the second part, treats hu¬
man illness—diseases, the present state of the higher
medical disciplines, and the practice of medicine.
Volume VII, concerned with the human species, has
three divisions: anthropology, ethnography, and ethnol¬
ogy—the first considering the diversity of human groups;
the second, peoples and races; and the third, population
and sexuality.
Volume VIII, concerned with the stages of humanity,
covers the study of human character and psychoanaly¬
sis.
Volume IX deals with the social and economic world,
covering statistical data, the dynamics of social devel¬
opment, the operations of economics, the distribution of

[ 84 ]
 The Propaedia

wealth, the satisfaction of human needs and the costs

thereof, economic problems and issues, and the emer¬
gence of a new economy.
Volume X, on the state, has five sections: 1) the history
of the state; 2) political data; 3) political institutions; 4)
political activities; and 5) international relations.
Volume XI, on international affairs, considers the
sources of international conflict, lines that cross inter¬
national borders, the blocs of nations, and the world scene.
Volume XII treats chemistry, first considering chemis¬
try as a science, then the human significance of chemis¬
try, and finally the chemistry of human beings.
Volume XIII deals with industry and agriculture, treat¬
ing the technology of each and the human uses of each.
Volume XIV is concerned with everyday life. It con¬
siders man’s daily life, the organization of human space,
living quarters, nutrition, clothing, and entertainment.
Volume XV, which covers education and instruction,
first considers the types of teaching in countries having
liberal traditions and institutions, then teaching in three
European dictatorships and also in countries outside of
Europe. It goes on to report pedagogical methods and
cultural objectives, and finally it takes up a number of
political and social problems affecting education.
Volumes XVI and XVII are entitled art and literature,
respectively. Despite that general heading for the two
volumes, the first of these deals with the worker and the
consumer; the second, with the interaction of the worker
and the consumer.
Volume XVIII, concerned with the role of writing in
civilized nations, treats first the graphic arts, then the
importance of books, their publication and distribution,
then magazines and newspapers, and finally libraries.
Volume XIX is on philosophies and religions. The part
dealing with philosophies treats the principal trends of

[ 85 ]
 Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

contemporary philosophy, including the state of current

philosophical problems and the means of their solution;
it concludes with an exposition of philosophical doc¬
trines. The part dealing with religions has three sec¬
tions: the phenomonology of religions; the history and
sociology of religion; and the spirit of contemporary re¬
ligions.
Finally, Volume XX undertakes to consider the emerg¬
ing world—its history, its evolution, and its future.
This description of the contents of the twenty volumes
departs in many instances from the table of contents laid
down when the encyclopedia was first projected. For one
reason or another, the editors found themselves obliged
to change course as the work proceeded volume by vol¬
ume.
This indicates one embarrassment that seems inescap¬
able in the progressive construction of a topical encyclo¬
pedia. Another arises from the conflict between the
pedagogical ordering of the subjects to be considered and
the logical arrangement of subject matters or of the var¬
ious departments of knowledge. It is apparent that the
editors of the Encyclopedie frangaise shifted from one
focus to the other, not only in the succession of volumes,
but also in the structuring of each volume. In addition,
questions arise concerning matters omitted, overlooked,
or given only passing or subordinate treatment in con¬
trast to subjects that occupy the center of the stage.*

* The Chinese are currently engaged in producing a great encyclopedia, the

first (in a strict use of the word “encyclopedia”) in the Chinese language. One
part of it is alphabetical, consisting in a translation, with minor modifications,
of Britannica’s Micropaedia (volumes of short informational entries). The other
part will consist of some seventy volumes, topically arranged, each treating a
whole department or province of knowledge or learning. This work has only
just begun and therefore it is impossible to report the subject matters to be
successively covered in these seventy or more volumes. But there can be little

[ 86 ]
 The Propaedia

All of these embarrassments and questions connected

with the planning and execution of a topically organized
encyclopedia came to the attention of the Britannica’s
Board of Editors as they weighed the pros and cons of
topical versus alphabetical organization. How long the
debate would have gone on and how it would have been
decided remains in doubt, for the issue was decided for
the Board of Editors by Senator William Benton, the
publisher of the encyclopedia and chairman of the Board
of Directors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Benton attended the editorial meetings. He declined to
take the risk of a commercial failure that might result from
publishing a topical encyclopedia. Coleridge’s Encyclo¬
pedia Metropolitana had experienced such a failure in
the nineteenth century, and the history of the Encyclo¬
pedic frangaise gave no assurance that matters stood
otherwise in the twentieth century. There appeared to be
no sizeable market for an encyclopedia that did not eas¬
ily serve the wishes of those who purchased encyclope¬
dias as reference works for the purpose of looking things
up, a purpose much more readily served by an alphabet¬
ical than by a topical arrangement of articles, even if the
latter is accompanied by an alphabetically organized in¬
dex of subjects.
At one point in the ongoing discussion, the chairman
of the Board of Editors, Mr. Hutchins, proposed a com¬
promise. He suggested dividing the whole encyclopedia
into two subsets of volumes. One subset would provide
information about the particulars of persons, places, and
things—the biographical and geographical articles, and
an account of particular institutions, events, and objects.

doubt that, when completed, the same embarrassments and difficult questions
will have emerged.

[ 87 ]
 *

Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

The other subset would provide the coverage of the ma¬

jor subjects in all departments of knowledge and in all
fields of art, science, and scholarship. The first subset
would be alphabetically arranged for the look-it-up pur¬
pose; the second would be topically arranged for those
who wished to study a whole area of subject matter.
This suggestion was also rejected. It emerged once again
after the fifteenth edition had been completed and pub¬
lished in 1974, at a time when I, having succeeded Rob¬
ert Hutchins as chairman of the Board of Editors, proposed
this plan for another new edition of the encyclopedia. It
was once again rejected by the Board and by the man¬
agement of the company.
I had been a member of the Board of Editors since its
inception in 1949, and I became director of editorial
planning for the fifteenth edition of Britannica in 1965.
One innovative change in the plan that was finally
adopted derived from those earlier editorial delibera¬
tions. This was the proposed division of the volumes of
the encyclopedia into two subsets: one containing a large
number of relatively short entries having mainly infor¬
mational content, the other containing a very small num¬
ber of relatively long articles, essays on the major subjects
in all fields of knowledge. Both series of articles—the short
ones comprising the “Micropaedia” and the long ones in
“Macropaedia”—were to be alphabetically arranged.
That change in the fifteenth edition, though a radical
departure, did in fact reflect the typographical distinc¬
tion in Britannica’s first edition between the short infor¬
mational entries and the long scholarly essays expounding
the state of organized knowledge. The execution of this
part of the plan has been completed in the 1985 revision
of the fifteenth edition.
The other radical innovation that emerged in the plan-

1 88 ]
 The Propaedia

ning for the fifteenth edition attempted to resolve the is¬

sue of topical versus alphabetical arrangement. Given the
unalterable decision that articles had to be alphabeti¬
cally arranged and their subject matter alphabetically in¬
dexed, we invented a device whereby the reader would
be given a topical as well as an alphabetical mode of ac¬
cess to the contents of the encyclopedia.
That device took the form of an outline of knowledge
that would be both a scheme for editing the fifteenth edi¬
tion in a more intelligible and systematic fashion than any
alphabetical encyclopedia had been previously edited, and
also an analytical Table of Contents for the use of those
readers who wished to study in a protracted manner some
whole field of subject matter or some department of
learning. Because we thought this proposed outline of
knowledge would serve as a readable introduction to the
encyclopedia as a whole, we called the volume that con¬
tained it the “Propaedia.”
Planning it as a Table of Contents for the long articles
in the Macropaedia, we affixed page references to the
thousands of topics enumerated in the Outline of
Knowledge. We subsequently improved the Propaedia by
removing these page references and turning the Propae¬
dia into an elaborate study guide, or set of study guides.
In each of the 186 sections of the Outline of Knowledge
we eliminated all page references and replaced them with
the titles of articles in both the Macropaedia and the Mi-
cropaedia recommended as relevant to the topics cov¬
ered in each section of the Outline. This improvement of
the Propaedia first appeared in 1985.
The initial construction of the Outline of Knowledge
took eight years of work, involving the senior members
of the Britannica’s editorial staff under the supervision
of Philip Goetz, then Britannica’s executive editor, now

[ 89 ]
 Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

its editor-in-chief. It also involved consultation with ac¬

ademic specialists in all the fields of knowledge and
learning covered in the outline.
It is important to stress the fact that the' production of
the Propaedia was a vast collaborative effort. In that re¬
spect, the Propaedia’s map or chart of the whole realm
of human learning differs from all the maps or charts
presented in the preceding chapters, especially those
produced from the seventeenth century on, all of which
were the work of individuals.
Before I set forth a synopsis of the Outline of Knowl¬
edge as it appeared in the 1985 version of the Propaedia,
I must call attention to one fact about the order of its ten
parts. Here are the ten parts as entitled:
Part One. Matter and Energy
Part Two. The Earth
Part Three. Life on Earth
Part Four. Human Life
Part Five. Human Society
Part Six. Art
Part Seven. Technology
Part Eight. Religion
Part Nine. The History of Mankind
Part Ten. The Branches of Knowledge

My preface to the Propaedia, entitled “The Circle of

Learning,” pointed out that these ten parts were not to
be thought of as arranged in an ascending or descending
linear order, nor arranged in a hierarchical fashion, going
from what is more fundamental to what is less funda¬
mental, or from what is simple to what is more complex;
and certainly not in an order that was either primarily
logical or primarily pedagogical.
I explained the reason for this. We live in an age and
in a society that is dominated by cultural pluralism and
intellectual heterodoxy. Unacceptable, therefore, would

1 90 ]
 The Propaedia

be any ordering of the departments of knowledge or the

fields of learning that is hierarchical or that is ascending
or descending in a scale of values involving judgments
about what is more or less fundamental, important, or
significant, or about what should be studied from first to
last for logical or pedagogical reasons. Such an ordering
would be regarded as culturally monolithic instead of
pluralistic, or as the expression of an orthodoxy that was
purely subjective instead of accommodating the preva¬
lent intellectual heterodoxy. It would be challenged at
every point as being opinionated in a privately tenden¬
tious manner instead of representing, as it should, a pub¬
lic consensus. A “ladder” of learning is therefore ruled
out. All parts of learning must be treated coordinately as
if they were all placed in relation to one another like
points on a circle.
The same embarrassments and difficulties that were
unavoidable in the construction of a purely topical en¬
cyclopedia, such as the Encyclopedie frangaise, would
plague the construction of a topical outline of knowl¬
edge that involved the kind of value judgments entering
into any hierarchical ordering of departments of knowl¬
edge or fields of learning.
For all these reasons, I declared that the ten parts of
the outline of knowledge formed a circle, in which no
part came first and none came last. Each of the ten parts
could be a starting point from which one might move in
any direction to other parts of the circle. Each part might
be placed at the center of the circle, as a focus from which
one could move out along one radius after another to the
remaining nine parts on the periphery of the circle.
The whole of the Propaedia’s synoptic outline of
knowledge deserves to be read carefully. It represents a
twentieth-century scheme for the organization of knowl¬
edge that is more comprehensive than any other and that

[ 91 ]
 Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

also accommodates the intellectual heterodoxy of our

time. I have placed it in Appendix I, to which I hope
readers will turn with a special interest after they have
read the concluding paragraphs of this book.
Here I wish only to have readers look at Part Ten of
this outline, entitled “The Branches of Knowledge.” It
consists of five divisions, as follows.

I. Logic
History and Philosophy of Logic
Formal Logic, Metalogic, and Applied Logic
II. Mathematics
History and Foundations of Mathematics
Branches of Mathematics
Applications of Mathematics
III. Science
History and Philosophy of Science
The Physical Sciences
The Earth Sciences
The Biological Sciences
Medicine and Affiliated Disciplines
The Social Sciences and Psychology
The Technological Sciences
IV. History and the Humanities
Historiography and the Study of History
The Humanities and Humanistic Scholarship
V. Philosophy
History of Philosophy
The Nature and Divisions of Philosophy
Philosophical Schools and Doctrines

This ordering of the branches of knowledge calls for a

number of critical comments.

[ 92 ]
 The Propaedia

One lies in the fact that Part Ten differs radically from
the other nine parts. The first nine parts cover knowl¬
edge about the world of nature and of man. The topics
there set forth indicate the learning we can acquire from
the scientists and the scholars who, in their respective
disciplines, study the phenomena of nature, of human life,
and of human society—its institutions, arts, technology,
religions, and history. In sharp contrast the tenth part
(with three exceptions to be noted presently) deals with
the disciplines themselves, the various branches of
knowledge—their scope, history, methods, subdivisions,
and problems.
The three exceptions are the divisions of Part Ten en¬
titled “Logic,” “Mathematics,” and “Philosophy.” The
opening sections of each of these three divisions deal with
the nature of these disciplines in themselves: their scope,
history, and methods. But the remaining sections in each
case set forth the knowledge or learning that can be ac¬
quired from studying logic, mathematics, and philoso¬
phy. They set forth the doctrines and theories of logic,
mathematics, and philosophy, just as the other nine parts
set forth the doctrines and theories of physics, astron¬
omy, chemistry, the earth sciences, biology, psychology,
the social sciences, and so on.
That being the case, we are faced with the question
whether it was proper to place logic, mathematics, and
philosophy in Part Ten along with the treatment of the
other branches of knowledge, the doctrines and theories
of which are covered in the first nine parts.
Logic and mathematics have special objects of study—
purely intelligible objects that have no existence in the
physical world. In sharp contrast, the empirical sci¬
ences, natural and social, explore and study the phe¬
nomenal world of real existence. Like logic and
mathematics, some branches of philosophy also treat
 Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

purely intelligible objects, but other branches of philos¬

ophy have objects that are the same as the objects stud¬
ied in the empirical sciences, although studied there by
methods distinctly different from the methods of philos¬
ophy. This makes the placement in Part Ten of philoso¬
phy, along with logic and mathematics and other branches
of knowledge, peculiarly troublesome.
There is an additional difficulty about philosophy. At
certain places in the first nine parts, we find such topics
as the philosophy of law, the philosophy of education,
the philosophy of art, and so on. A similar difficulty arises
with respect to history. Part Nine is devoted to the his¬
tory of mankind, but that is mainly social and political
history. Most of cultural and intellectual history is to be
found in the other parts; e.g., the history of legal sys¬
tems, the history of education, the history of each of the
fine arts, and so on, in Parts One through Nine of the
outline; and the history of logic, of mathematics, of phi¬
losophy, and of the various empirical sciences and other
fields of scholarship, in Part Ten.
These difficulties raise questions about the very spe¬
cial character of philosophy and history in the whole
range of disciplines. I shall return to these questions in
Chapter 14. The discussion of this matter will have great
significance for a final attempt to provide the kind of
guidance that I have promised my readers.
One more serious defect in the Propaedia’s Outline of
Knowledge remains to be considered. Being an outline
of the kinds of knowledge or the departments of learning
that can properly be covered in a general encyclopedia,
the encyclopedic treatment of philosophy is necessarily
restricted to the exposition of the doctrines and theories
that are taught to students in the academy by professors
of philosophy. But such academic or professional phi¬
losophy (I am tempted to say “professorial philosophy’’)

[ 94 ]
 The Propaedia

is not philosophy for the layman—the kind of philoso¬

phy which is, or should be, everybody’s business.
Philosophy, so conceived, consists in the understand¬
ing of the great ideas that provide the underlying prin¬
ciples and governing insights in every field of subject
matter. The generalist’s approach to the study of the arts
and sciences and the various departments of scholarship
must be in terms of the basic principles and governing
insights that derive from an understanding of these ideas.
An adequate treatment of the great ideas is not to be
found in an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia provides its
readers with information and the organized knowledge
that results from scientific research and scholarly in¬
quiry. It does not include philosophical understanding or
poetic insights, and certainly does not provide specula¬
tive or practical wisdom.
We must look elsewhere for a thorough examination and
clarification of the great ideas and of the issues and con¬
troversies that revolve around them. We must turn from
the Propaedia’s Outline of Knowledge, knowledge that is
properly covered in an encyclopedia, to Great Books of
the Western World if we are to consider the significance
of the great ideas for a guidebook to learning.
As the Propaedia’s Outline of Knowledge stands in re¬
lation to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so the Syntopi-
con’s enumeration of the great ideas and its essays on each
of them stand in relation to Great Books of the Western
World. What the Syntopicon can do for us in this guide
book to learning is the subject of the following chapter.

[ 95 ]
CHAPTER 12

The Syntopicon

Great Books of the Western World had its inception at

the University of Chicago when Robert Hutchins was
president of the university and I was a member of the
faculty. The instigation of the project came from William
Benton in 1943, the same year that he became the pub¬
lisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
After eight years of work, involving the collaboration
of many scholars, that set of books was published in 1952
with Hutchins as Editor-in-Chief and myself as Associ¬
ate Editor. I was, in addition, responsible for the produc¬
tion of the Syntopicon that accompanied the Great Books
and served as an instrument for locating passages in them
where their authors discussed the topics that constituted
the inner structure of the great ideas. Because it was or¬
ganized around three thousand topics under 102 great
ideas, that instrument, occupying two volumes in the set,
came to be called The Great Ideas, or Syntopicon (the
coined word “syntopicon” meaning a collection of top¬
ics).
The selection of the authors and works to comprise
Great Books was carried out by an editorial committee
over a period of three years. The production of the Syn¬
topicon was the work of an editorial staff numbering more
[ 96 ]
 The Syntopicon

than thirty-five persons and involved 400,000 man-hours

of reading over the course of six years. This endeavor did
not begin until two years had been spent in determining
which ideas were “great” in the sense of being major
centers of discussion and controversy throughout the
twenty-five-century span of Western civilization. Index¬
ing the intellectual content of 443 works by seventy-four
authors stretching across twenty-five centuries from Ho¬
mer to Freud was, to say the least, a challenging task.
Just as the Propaedia functions to give readers topical
access to the information and organized knowledge con¬
tained in the encyclopedia, so the Syntopicon functions
to provide readers with topical access to the ideas dis¬
cussed in the Great Books. The problem confronted in the
editing of the Syntopicon was the same as that faced in
the editing of the Propaedia.
In the latter case, as we have seen, the question was:
How should the ten parts of the Outline of Knowledge
be organized—in a linear, ascending, or descending fash¬
ion, or in a circle that allowed each of the ten parts to be
considered as coordinate with all the others?
In the case of the Syntopicon we faced a similar ques¬
tion: How should the 102 great ideas be set forth—with
some given precedence or priority over others in terms
of an evaluation of their degree of greatness, or treated
as coordinate with one another, none subordinate, none
supraordinate?
Our decision was the same in both cases and for the
same reason. The pluralistic culture and the intellectual
heterodoxy of the twentieth century, we felt, would not
tolerate the kind of value judgments involved in a hier¬
archical ordering of either the great ideas or the parts of
knowledge. An individual author, signing his name to a
book he has himself written, might be in a position to
argue for or defend value judgments of this kind; but a
 Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

work produced by the collaborative effort of many per¬

sons, such as the Propaedia and the Syntopicon, does not
have that option. Hence the 102 great ideas were pre¬
sented in strictly alphabetical order, and the Great Books
themselves were presented in a sequence roughly deter¬
mined by the chronological order of their authors’ lives.
Could anything be done to introduce some ordering of
both the books and the ideas in a more significant and
intelligible fashion than one determined alphabetically
or chronologically? That question is relevant to our pre¬
sent concerns, for only when we depart from or tran¬
scend such intellectually neutral orderings as those
provided by alphabetization and chronology do we be¬
gin to see guidelines for the pursuit of learning.
Our solution of this problem with regard to the Great
Books was accomplished by dividing the authors into four
main groups, and then indicating such grouping by plac¬
ing swatches of different color on the backbones of the
volumes that contained their works.
A yellow swatch indicated works of imaginative liter¬
ature—epic and dramatic poetry, novels and plays, and,
in the case of Shakespeare’s and Milton’s sonnets, lyric
poetry as well. A green swatch indicated works in the
fields of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry,
biology, psychology, and medicine. A blue swatch indi¬
cated histories, biographies, and treatises in the fields of
political theory and economics. A red swatch indicated
works in philosophy and theology—metaphysics, the
philosophy of nature, the philosophy of mind, and both
natural and sacred theology.
This classification of the volumes in Great Books of the
Western World could not be perfectly precise, because
where the volumes contained all the works of certain au¬
thors, or even several of them, placing that author in one
of these four groups had to ignore the fact that some of

[ 98 ]
 The Syntopicon

his writings may belong in one group and some in an¬

other. His being placed in one group rather than another
could be defended only in terms of the predominant
character of his contribution to the tradition of Western
culture.
Before I turn to the way in which we attempted to solve
the same problem with regard to the great ideas, in order
to offset or overcome the neutrality of their alphabetical
enumeration, I think it useful to give the reader that al¬
phabetical listing first. Here it is.

Angel Family Mathematics

Animal Fate Matter
Aristocracy Form Mechanics
Art God Medicine
Astronomy Good and Evil Memory and
Beauty Government Imagination
Being Habit Metaphysics
Cause Happiness Mind
Chance History Monarchy
Change Honor Nature
Citizen Hypothesis Necessity and
Constitution Idea Contingency
Courage Immortality Oligarchy
Custom and Induction One and Many
Convention Infinity Opinion
Definition Judgment Opposition
Democracy Justice Philosophy
Desire Knowledge Physics
Dialectic Labor Pleasure and Pain
Duty Language Poetry
Education Law Principle
Element Liberty Progress
Emotion Life and Death Prophecy
Eternity Logic Prudence
Evolution Love Punishment
Experience Man Quality

[ 99 ]
 Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

Quantity Sin Universal and

Reasoning Slavery Particular

Relation Soul Virtue and Vice

Religion Space War and Peace

Revolution State Wealth

Rhetoric Temperance Will

Same and Other Theology Wisdom

Science Time World

Sense Truth
Sign and Symbol Tyranny

Is that list, as drawn up in the 1940s, satisfactory to¬

day? Should any ideas be added to it? I have only three
nominations now for additions to the 102. I think the
omission of Equality should be corrected, and perhaps
also the omission of Power and Property. Equality cer¬
tainly belongs in the list along with Liberty. Property may
already be sufficiently covered in connection with Wealth;
and the same may be said about Power in connection with
State, Government, and Tyranny.
Examination of the 102 great ideas as alphabetically
listed will reveal that the list includes twelve ideas that
stand out as different from all the rest. In alphabetical
order they are: Art, Astronomy, History, Mechanics,
Medicine, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Physics, Poetry, Re¬
ligion, Science, Theology. If readers recall the difference
between Part Ten in the Propaedia, concerned with the
branches of knowledge, and parts One through Nine,
which cover what we know about the world by means of
these various branches of knowledge, they will see that
the same difference exists between the special set of
twelve ideas named above and all the rest.
That difference was explained in medieval thought by
a distinction between the use of our mind in the first and
in the second intention. We use our minds in the first

[ 100 ]
 The Syntopicon

intention when we use them to know and to understand

reality—the world in which we live in all its aspects. We
use our minds in the second intention when we use them
to know and understand the branches of knowledge that
in turn study reality.
Applied to the Propaedia, this distinction requires us
to differentiate Part Ten, which has second intentional
significance, from Parts One through Nine, which have
first intentional significance. Applied to the Syntopicon,
the same distinction separates the special set of twelve
ideas named from all the rest.
The second volume of the Syntopicon contains an es¬
say on how it was constructed. That essay makes use of
this distinction to suggest how ideas in the first inten¬
tion can be grouped under one or another idea in the
second intention. It offers examples of such groupings.
These are reported below with some additions that I now
think are worth making.

THEOLOGY and RELIGION

Angel, Eternity, God, Immortality, Prophecy, Sin

METAPHYSICS
Being, Cause, Change, Form, God, Infinity, Mat¬
ter, Necessity and Contingency, One and Many,
Opposition, Same and Other, Truth, and perhaps
also Quality and Quantity

MATHEMATICS, MECHANICS, PHYSICS

Cause, Chance, Change, Element, Infinity, Matter,
Nature, Quality, Quantity, Space, Time, World

[ 101 ]
 s

Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

LOGIC

Definition, Dialectic, Hypothesis, Induction,

judgment, Language, Opposition, Reasoning, Re¬
lation, Rhetoric, Sign and Symbol, Truth, Univer¬
sal and Particular

POLITICAL THEORY
(Philosophical or Scientific)

Aristocracy, Citizen, Constitution, Custom and

Convention, Democracy, Family, Government,
Justice, Law, Liberty [and Equality], Monarchy,
Oligarchy, Punishment, Revolution, Slavery, State,
Tyranny, War and Peace

ETHICS
(or Moral Philosophy)

Courage, Duty, Good and Evil, Happiness, Honor,

Justice, Liberty [and Equality], Love, Pleasure and
Pain, Prudence, Temperance, Virtue and Vice,
Wisdom

ECONOMICS

Labor, Wealth, and also Property (if included)

PSYCHOLOGY
(Philosophical or Scientific)

Animal, Desire, Emotion, Experience, Habit,

Knowledge, Language, Love, Man, Memory and
Imagination, Mind, Opinion, Pleasure and Pain,
Reasoning, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Will

[ 102 ]
 The Syntopicon

BIOLOGY

Animal, Evolution, Life and Death, Medicine,

Sense

The foregoing does not claim to be exhaustive of all the

possible ways in which ideas in the first intention can be
grouped under ideas in the second intention that are the
names of the various branches of knowledge or depart¬
ments of learning.
There are other ways of grouping ideas—without ref¬
erence to the disciplines under which they fall. For ex¬
ample, History, Change, Progress, and Time are intimately
connected. So, too, are Experience, Habit, Memory and
Imagination, and Sense.
Beauty, Good and Evil, and Truth form a traditionally
acknowledged triad of fundamental values; so also do
Liberty, Equality, and Justice.
The ideas of Knowledge and Opinion belong in a col¬
lation with Logic, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Mechan¬
ics, Philosophy, Science, and Theology; and with them
may be grouped Definition, Hypothesis, Induction, Judg¬
ment, Reasoning, and Truth.
The traditionally acknowledged learned professions,
which formed the triad of doctoral degrees in medieval
universities, are represented in the list of great ideas by
Law, Medicine, and Theology. Today we might add En¬
gineering or Technology.
All these groupings of certain great ideas under other
great ideas that name familiar disciplines or branches of
knowledge, as well as the indication of other ways in
which great ideas are interconnected, have much more
significance for us than a purely alphabetical listing. They
rise above the flat neutrality of the alphabet, but they still
do not transcend it to the point where they reach a hi-

[ 103 ]
 Contemporary Efforts to Organize Knowledge

erarchical ordering of the ideas in a scale of priorities or

of grades of importance.
Whether anything like that can be done in the twen¬
tieth century, either for the branches of knowledge or for
the great ideas, remains to be seen. Earlier chapters of this
book, especially chapters 5 and 6 (which report ancient
and medieval schemes for the organization of knowl¬
edge), and to some extent even chapters 7, 8, and 9 (which
report maps or charts of learning proposed in the sev¬
enteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries), have
given us orderings of the parts of knowledge that appeal
to philosophical principles, either explicitly or implic¬
itly.
The organization of knowledge, or the ordering and re¬
lation of its branches or parts, is essentially a philosoph¬
ical task. It is not the business of the historian or the
scientist. When either historians or scientists attempt to
define their own fields of inquiry and to distinguish them
from other disciplines, they do so as philosophers, not
as historians or scientists.
If any light can be thrown on the problem of how to
organize knowledge in the twentieth century—how to
order and relate its parts or branches—it must come from
philosophy; and it must do so in a manner that accords
to some extent with the cultural pluralism and intellec¬
tual heterodoxy of the present age.

[ 104 ]
PART FOUR
s

>

4
CHAPTER 13

What Comes Next

I can imagine that some readers who have been patient

and persistent enough to reach this point will be some¬
what perplexed. They are likely to be wondering what
all they have been through adds up to and what comes
next.
That state of mind on the part of readers may help me
to achieve the objective I had in mind in writing this book.
I have given in the preceding pages a survey of the state
of learning in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in mod¬
ern times. In my judgment it was necessary for readers
to become acquainted with the traditional maps or
charts of learning in those periods, so as to appreciate their
need for clarification and their need for guidance as to
the state of learning in the contemporary world. Such
guidance is not to be found in the literature of this sub¬
ject.
The next chapter will set forth the indispensable in¬
sights and distinctions that can be employed in the
twentieth century to provide direction and guidance for
exploring the whole field of human learning. It will be
followed by a conclusion that offers readers guidelines
for a lifetime of learning, especially in adult life after all
schooling is completed.
[ 107 ]
 Philosophical Illumination

The insights and distinctions that constitute the phil¬

osophical illuminations to be found in the next chapter
are not entirely twentieth-century innovations.
They draw on, or incorporate with modification, Aris¬
totle’s hierarchy rising from physics to mathematics and
from mathematics to metaphysics in the sphere of theo¬
retical knowledge.
They stress his distinction between the theoretical and
the practical spheres of inquiry, with ethics and politics
the architectonic disciplines in the practical sphere.
They give a central place to his differentiation of pai-
deia, or the general learning that should be in the pos¬
session of everyone, from episteme, or the specialized
learning that belongs to experts in this or that particular
field of knowledge.
They derive insight from the medieval as well as the
ancient insistence upon the indispensability of the lib¬
eral arts—the skills of the mind involved in every form
of inquiry and every process of learning. They derive in¬
sight as well from the medieval hierarchy of the three
learned professions (medicine, law, and theology), and
from the medieval conception of theology as queen of the
sciences, with philosophy serving as her handmaiden.
They find additional insight in Francis Bacon’s triad
of history, poetry, and philosophy, the latter including
the empirical and experimental sciences as well as the
branches of moral and speculative philosophy, with me¬
taphysics, or philosophia prima, at the apex. This is
supplemented by Auguste Comte’s ordering of the posi¬
tive sciences and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s plan for a
topical encyclopedia.
Putting all these antecedent insights, distinctions, and
orderings to good use, in an attempt to do somethig anal¬
ogous that is appropriate for the twentieth century, it is

[ 108 ]
 What Comes Next

necessary to separate what is sound from the unsound,

and to retain only what is acceptable in the present age.
If readers of this book, reaching this point, have a sense
that what they have been offered so far does not give them
the guidelines that this work promised to provide, I hope
that what lies ahead will fulfill that promise reasonably
well.

[ 109 ]
CHAPTER 14

Indispensable Insights
and Distinctions

The Goods of the Mind

AS health, strength, vigor, and vitality are bodily goods,
so information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom
are goods of the mind—goods that, acquired, perfect it.
A moment’s reflection will discern that these four goods
are not coordinate, not of equal value. Rather, as just
named, they ascend in a scale of values, information
having the least value, wisdom the greatest.
This view of the matter may run against the grain in
this age of ours, which we praise for its superabundant
information and for the knowledge explosion that distin¬
guishes it from all its predecessors. No one has ever said
that it is an age in which understanding has been en¬
larged or enhanced. Even less would any one dare to say
that wisdom has at last come into its own in the twen¬
tieth century.
Information—usually acquired bit by bit—is obviously
of the least value among the goods of the mind listed
above. There is a great deal of useless information, much
of it purveyed by newspapers, magazines, and programs
on radio and television, and given exaggerated impor-

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 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

tance in a popular game rightly called Trivial Pursuit.

There may be some useless knowledge and understand¬
ing, but it is difficult to think how that could be; and cer¬
tainly there is no useless wisdom.
Of course, there is a great deal of useful information,
too, but when it is put to use it can be used for either
good or evil purposes. Villains, knaves, and scoupdrels
have to be well-informed to succeed in their nefarious ^
activities. Understanding can seldom be misused; and to
speak of a “wise criminal” is a contradiction in terms.
What has just been said about information also applies
to knowledge to a certain extent. I am using the word
“knowledge” to designate what we might also refer to as
a body of knowledge, such as a particular science or a
particular branch of philosophy. Unlike information,
which comes to us bit by bit, organized knowledge is ac¬
quired—or at least put together—in a more systematic
fashion. The way in which its component parts are re¬
lated to one another, their sequence and interconnec¬
tion, has some intelligible rationale.
There may be no useless knowledge, as there certainly
is useless information, but there can be no doubt that
knowledge, like information, can be put to good or evil
use. Examples of how knowledge applied technologi¬
cally can be used to the detriment of mankind and even
the destruction of civilization are too obvious to need
mention. In this century, when we have become acutely
aware of this fact, controversy has occurred over the is¬
sue of whether a moratorium should be imposed on sci¬
entific research that carries with it the promise of
technological applications that threaten the future of
mankind.
There is another way of perceiving the ascending or¬
der in which these four goods of the mind stand. One can

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Philosophical Illumination

have bits of information without having knowledge in the

sense defined; and even without possessing a body of
knowledge that incorporates such information in its or¬
ganization. On the other hand, bodies of knowledge—
historical, scientific, or philosophical—involve a great deal
of information, but always much more than that.
One can have knowledge without understanding the
significance of the knowledge possessed, or without un¬
derstanding its significance as fully as possible. Knowl¬
edge accompanied by such understanding is certainly
better than bare knowledge in the absence of it; and the
greater the understanding that enlightens the knowledge,
the better.
Understanding anything presupposes some informa¬
tion or knowledge about it, but not the other way around.
Being informed about something or even knowing it does
not entail an understanding of it.
Wisdom stands at the top in this sequence of the four
goods of the mind It presupposes having the informa¬
tion, knowledge, and understanding requisite for attain¬
ing the most fundamental insights that our minds can
achieve.
The cultural pluralism and intellectual heterodoxy of
the twentieth century may cause us to be intolerant of
other hierarchies in the domain of human learning, but
it is difficult to see how we could be led to dismiss the
ascending scale of values that puts information at the
bottom and wisdom at the top, with understood knowl¬
edge superior to bare knowledge in the middle. This ob¬
viously has a bearing on the value we place upon
historical knowledge, the scientific knowledge we pos¬
sess by means of empirical or experimental research, and
the understanding achieved through philosophical re¬
flection about our historical and scientific knowledge.

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 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

The Modes of Knowing

If I may now be permitted to use the word “know” in
the broadest possible sense, I can translate into other terms
the fourfold division of all learning into 1) obtaining or
receiving information, 2) acquiring knowledge, 3) sup¬
plementing it with understanding, and 4) reaching for
wisdom.
First, let it be said that retaining information is an act
of memory. Acquiring knowledge, supplementing it with
understanding, and attaining wisdom are acts of the in¬
tellect and of reason.
We do not need schooling to get information, although
far too much of it in fact is devoted to imparting infor¬
mation and not much more. The information that we did
not get, or that we have not retained from our schooling,
can always be obtained by us in adult life, after our for¬
mal education has been completed, through the use of
reference books of all sorts—atlases, gazetteers, diction¬
aries, encyclopedias, and data bases of all sorts.
Schooling should have prepared us to be able to use
reference books effectively in order to obtain whatever bits
of information we may require. But its much more im¬
portant function is to prepare us for the growth of our
minds in continued learning that enriches our minds not
merely with more knowledge than we acquired in school,
but with more understanding, and with some approach
to wisdom.
• Now let us ask what are the modes of knowing when
we use the word “know” in the broadest possible sense.
Here is the answer: We can know that, know what, know
how, know why and wherefore. Bits of information con¬
sist in knowing that something is the case—knowing this
particular fact or that one. Beyond knowing facts (that

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Philosophical Illumination

something or other has occurred or exists), we can know

what it is, what attributes it has, and in what relations it
stands to other things. Historical and scientific knowl¬
edge involves knowing what as well as that. Such know¬
ing requires methodical investigation or research.
Knowing why and wherefore enlightens or illuminates
knowing that and what by insight and understanding and
calls for philosophical reflection about whatever it is that
we otherwise know. Knowing why and wherefore, in the
most fundamental or ultimate terms, is the attainment of
wisdom.
What about knowing how? This takes two forms.* One
is knowing how to act for our own good and for the good
of the society in which we live. The other is knowing how
to make things, how to produce objects that are not to be
found in the natural world that surrounds us. These are
all works of art, using the word “art” in its broadest sense,
meaning, thereby, any productive skill we may have for
the production of artifacts.
Within the sphere of art, know-how may also consist
in the skillful performance of certain activities, such
bodily or athletic skills as swimming, skating, skiing,
fishing, sailing, dancing, and so on, as well as such in¬
tellectual skills as reading, writing, speaking, listening,
observing, calculating, measuring, evaluating, estimat¬
ing, and, of course, thinking.
Used in its broadest sense, the English word “art,”
which translates the Greek word “techne,” covers all these
forms of know-how. Another Greek word, phronesis,”
which is translated into English by the word “prudence”
or the phrase “practical wisdom,” signifies the other kind

* Knowing how a machine works is not a form of know-how that consists

in a skill we possess.

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 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

of know-how—knowing how to act for our own good and

for the good of the society in which we live.
This can be summarized by saying that one kind of
know-how consists in the arts or skills of production or
performance (for which the Greek word is poiesis, and
the other kind of know-how consists in the ability to act
well and wisely in the conduct of our lives (for which
the Greek word is praxis).
Two consequences follow from this consideration of the
forms of knowing: we can now add to the four goods of
the mind two more goods—the goods named by the words
“art” and “prudence”; and giving further consideration
to prudence, we now add yet another distinction to those
already made with regard to the modes of knowing. Our
knowing may be either descriptive and explanatory, or it
may be prescriptive and obligatory.
On the one hand, we may know that something is a
fact, what it is, and why it is. Then our knowing is de¬
scriptive and explanatory. On the other hand, we may
know that some objective or goal ought to be sought and
that something ought to be done in a certain way or that
certain means ought to be chosen to attain the appointed
objective or goal. Then our knowing is prescriptive and
obligatory.
The two little words “is” and “ought” encapsulate the
difference between descriptive and prescriptive knowl¬
edge. All our learning would be woefully inadequate for
the purposes of life if it were to consist solely in descrip¬
tive knowledge.
In both antiquity and in the medieval epoch, one of the
most fundamental divisions in the sphere of learning was
that between theory and practice—between knowing for
the sake of knowing or for the sake of applying knowl¬
edge to produce things or to perform well; and knowing

[ H5 ]
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Philosophical Illumination

for the sake of action, knowing that gives direction to the

conduct of our lives and our societies.
The first of these two kinds of knowing is to be found
in the division of the sphere of learning that is occupied
by history, the empirical sciences and their technologi¬
cal applications, and the branches of speculative philos¬
ophy. The second of these two kinds of knowing is to be
found in the division of the sphere of learning that is oc¬
cupied by the branches of practical philosophy: moral and
political philosophy.
The superiority of philosophy to history and to the
positive or empirical sciences does not lie in its supply¬
ing us with more knowledge in the form of know-that and
know-what. It provides us with very little knowledge of
that sort as compared with history and science. Nor does
such knowledge as philosophy may supply benefit us by
giving rise to technological applications or advances.
Philosophical knowledge does not have that use: it builds
no bridges, bakes no cakes, does not help us make any¬
thing.
Its superiority lies in its gift of understanding and wis¬
dom—knowledge in the form of knowing why-and-
wherefore—as well as in the use of such knowledge to
give direction to our lives and our societies. This is the
prescriptive knowledge to be found in moral and politi¬
cal philosophy.

Episteme and Paideia

I have used these two Greek words to designate a ma¬
jor division in the sphere of learning, one that comes
down to us from antiquity. The word “episteme,” which
is translated in Latin by “scientia,” signifies all forms of
specialized knowledge in which individuals may be ex¬
pert or competent, some in one specialized field, some

[ 116 1
 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

in another, but none in all the diverse forms of speciali¬

zation that have proliferated in the twentieth century.
Aristotle may have been able to be a competent special¬
ist in all the branches of science that existed in the fourth
century b.c.; but in the twentieth century, the century of
the so-called knowledge explosion, no one can be om¬
nicompetent—expert in all specialized departments of
learning.
The word “paideia,” which is translated in Latin by
“humanitas,” signifies the general learning that should
be in the possession of every human being—learning that
embraces or includes all the ways of knowing that have
been distinguished above.
In using these two Greek words to name two different
approaches to knowledge, I seek to correct a widely
prevalent, mistaken division of learning into the sci¬
ences, on the one hand, and the humanities, on the other
hand. I called attention earlier to a misuse of the word
“humanities” that began at the end of the nineteenth
century and has spread since then throughout the aca¬
demic world.
Wilhelm Dilthey’s Germanic bifurcation of all learning
into Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften was
incorrectly turned, in the twentieth century, into the nat¬
ural (and sometimes the natural and social) sciences, on
the one hand, and the humanities, on the other.
The word “humanities” or the phrase “humanistic
learning” should stand for a generalist approach to all
departments of knowledge, as against a specialist com¬
petence in this or that particular branch of knowledge. It
is accordingly incorrect and misleading to identify the
humanities with the branches or departments of knowl¬
edge that remain after the various natural and social sci¬
ences have been enumerated.
This mistake was made at the University of Chicago in

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 Philosophical Illumination

the 1930s when President Hutchins introduced a four¬

fold division into the structure of the university, begin¬
ning with the 1) physical sciences, 2) the biological
sciences, and 3) the social sciences, and ending with 4)
the humanities, in order to take care of all the university
departments not covered in the first three divisions.
What were “the humanities” in a university thus
structured? Philosophy, the study of religion, the study
of the fine arts, philology, and the study of foreign lan¬
guages. Psychology, as a behavioral science, aligned it¬
self with the social sciences; and so did history in part,
the remainder aligning itself with the humanities.
In the meaning of the word “humanities” or “human¬
istic” that I think preserves its original significance as it
comes down to us from antiquity and the Middle Ages,
any subject that is approached in the manner of the gen¬
eralist belongs to the humanities or is humanistically ap¬
proached. A subject that is studied in the manner of the
specialist does not belong there.
Mathematics, physics, and biology belong to the hu¬
manities when they are examined philosophically in the
manner of the generalist. They are then studied human¬
istically. History, poetry, and philosophy do not belong
to the humanities when they are studied in the manner
of specialist scholars. They are thus studied, for the most
part, by scholars in training for the Ph.D. degree. Such
specialized scholarship does not differ essentially from
the specialized research in the various departments of
empirical science. It is not humanistic.
The word “humanities” should not be used, as it is now
generally used in our universities and colleges, and even
our high schools, to stand for a particular set of subject
matters. Rather it should be used as Jose Ortega y Gasset
used it in his The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930.

[ 118 ]
 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

That is the book which so eloquently denigrates the bar¬

barism of specialization in the twentieth century, the
cultural malady that only the humanities, properly
understood, can alleviate.*
The use of the word “philosophy” in the “doctor of
philosophy” or Ph.D. degree also deserves comment at
this point. Like the word “humanities” as currently mis¬
used, “philosophy” is inappropriately applied when we
speak of a Ph.D. in physics, in history, in mathematics,
in geology, in literature, in music, in chemistry, or in any
other university department. This degree is given by all
the departments in our university graduate schools that
remain after we have set aside the professional schools, and
their degrees, such as the J.D. in law, the M.D. in medi¬
cine, and the D.D. or S.T.D. in religion or theology.**
The Ph.D. degree, as I have just pointed out, certifies
the completion of highly specialized research or schol¬
arship. That is true even when the Ph.D. degree is given
in philosophy itself. It does not signify a generalist or
humanistic approach to the study of basic ideas. No ac¬
ademic degree now in existence signifies that kind of ac¬
complishment.
The philosopher who conceives philosophy as every¬
body’s business is a generalist, not a specialist. (There are
few, if any, academic professors of philosophy who are
also philosophers in this sense.) If philosophers are more
than just professors of philosophy, they should be ency¬
clopedists who take all fields of learning and all modes
of knowing as their province. It follows, of course, that

* At the beginning of the century William James anticipated Ortega’s in¬

sight. He pointed out that any subject can be seen in a humanistic light by
being approached historically or philosophically.
** Doctor of Jurisprudence in law, Doctor of Medicine in medicine, and Doctor
of Divinity or Doctor of Sacred Theology in religion or theology.

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 Philosophical Illumination

encyclopedists should be philosophers—or humanistic

generalists—in the performance of their tasks.*
In our society, and in this century, everyone should be
both a generalist and a specialist: a generalist first and
last, and a specialist in between. With that in mind, it
should be said that the guidance needed in the process
of becoming an expert specialist is quite different from
the guidance required by those who wish to become cul¬
tivated generalists or generally educated human beings.
The alphabetical listing in college and university cata¬
logues of the departments that offer specialized courses
of instruction to students who then elect to major in one
field and take a minor in another provides the kind of
guidance needed by those who wish to specialize. It is
totally inadequate for those who may seek something akin
to a general education in college and university. They
need the kind of direction that I hope this book affords.

Art and Science

To achieve the philosophical clarifications I am at¬
tempting to provide in this chapter, I am compelled to
use words in senses that do not conform to their well-
established everyday usages.
Most people use the word “art” for the objects pro¬
duced by painters and sculptors, which hang on walls or
stand on pedestals. If they extend the use of the word to
cover more than the visual objects produced by the plas¬
tic and graphic arts (thereby including music, poetry, and
all forms of imaginative literature, dramatic perfor-

* In Appendix II, the reader will find critical passages from The Revolt of
the Masses and from another book by Ortega also published in 1930, Mission
of the University. Everything Ortega said about specialization and the spe¬
cialist in 1930 is many times more applicable to the state of affairs that exists
today.

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 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

mances, motion pictures, architecture, the ballet, pho¬

tography, and so on), they still leave unmentioned another
large group of artifacts—all the objects produced by the
technological applications of the empirical sciences and
other crafts, the useful as opposed to the fine arts.
As already indicated, I am asking my readers, for the
sake of this clarification of the fields of human learning,
to allow me to use the word “art” in its primary sense as
the name for a kind of knowing that is a productive skill
or a skill of performance—know-how as distinct from
know-that, know-what, and know-why.
When the word is thus used no one should have any
difficulty in drawing the line that separates art from sci¬
ence, or, stated more precisely, all the arts from all the
departments of knowledge that give us know-that, know-
what, and know-why, including here history in all its
forms, all the empirical or positive sciences, and all the
branches of theoretical philosophy.
The arts as productive know-how can also be easily
separated from the practical know-how of moral and po¬
litical philosophy—the know-how to act well in the con¬
duct of our lives and our societies.

The Classification of the Arts

In the foregoing paragraphs, I have divided the arts into
the fine arts, which produce objects for our enjoyment,
and the useful arts, which produce things that can be
utilized as means to accomplish whatever purposes
technologists and other craftsmen devise them to serve.
In the sphere of the useful arts, we must consider two
special groups of skills. One set of skills is traditionally
called liberal arts. These are the arts of grammar, rheto¬
ric, and logic—the arts of writing and reading, speaking
and listening, and analyzing and interpreting; in short,

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Philosophical Illumination

skill in every form of thinking that employs words.

The liberal arts also include skill in the forms of think¬
ing that employ mathematical symbols instead of ordi¬
nary language, and skill in historical research, scientific
investigation, and philosophical thought.
The other set of skills in the sphere of the useful arts
consists of three arts that are distinguished from all other
arts by virtue of the fact that they involve cooperation with
nature to help it produce results that would come into
existence anyway without human intervention. These are
the arts of farming, healing, and teaching. The products
of these three arts—food, health, and knowledge (in the
broadest sense of that term)—exist or come into exis¬
tence without the aid of farmers, healers, and teachers.
Farmers, cooperating with nature, help it to produce
grains and fruits, and the animals as well as the vegeta¬
bles we consume as food. Healers, or physicians, coop¬
erating with nature, help the processes whereby animal
or human organisms preserve or regain health. Teachers,
cooperating with nature, help the activity of learning that
goes on in the minds of students in the natural process
of acquiring knowledge and understanding. Without such
intellectual activity on the part of students, no genuine
learning ever occurs, no matter what teachers try to do
to make it occur.
All other arts, both fine and useful, produce artificial
things, artifacts, or man-made objects—things that would
never come into existence naturally or without the inter¬
vention of human effort and skill.

The Order of the Sciences

Let us turn now from the classification of the arts to
the order of the sciences, using the word “science” for
all forms of know-that and know-what.

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 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

Here we must first set history apart from all other

branches of knowledge by reason of the fact that it deals
with particulars, whereas mathematics, the empirical
sciences, and the branches of philosophy deal with uni¬
versal or generalities.
Next, we must distinguish the empirical sciences from
mathematics and the branches of philosophy here con¬
sidered as special departments of knowledge. The for¬
mer are investigative. They involve observational
procedures that obtain the data of special experience, the
kind of experience that no one has who does not under¬
take methodical processes of investigation or inquiry. The
latter are noninvestigative.
Mathematicians and philosophers employ experience,
but do not need the observational data to be found only
in the special experience of investigative empiricists. The
experience employed by the mathematician and the phi¬
losopher is the common experience of mankind, the ex¬
perience all of us have in our waking, conscious hours
when we are going about our business without using any
methods of investigation or engaging in any form of me¬
thodical inquiry.*
Like the historian and the empirical scientist, the phi¬
losopher as a specialized inquirer is concerned with things
or occurrences that exist in reality, whereas the objects
of the mathematician do not have real existence. The real
existences with which the historian and the empirical
scientist are concerned belong to the physical or natural
world. That world is also the province of the philosophy
of nature, but the philosopher goes beyond that world

*The distinctive character of mathematics as just described is exemplified

in the history of mathematics from its beginning to the middle of the twen¬
tieth century. If in recent years mathematicians have become investigative
empiricists, then the character of mathematics in the future may be different.

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Philosophical Illumination

when, in his metaphysics and theology, he thinks about

God and other spiritual beings.
The main division in the sphere of history is between
history that is social, political, or economic, and history
that is cultural or intellectual.
The ordering of the empirical sciences as physical, bi¬
ological, and behavioral or social, represents a progres¬
sion from the simple to the complex, from parts (such as
elementary particles, atoms, and molecules) to the wholes
they constitute (such as moving bodies studied in terres¬
trial mechanics and in chemistry, as well as the stars and
galaxies studied in astronomy).
We are still going from the simple to the complex when
we pass from the physical to the biological sciences and
to the study of living organisms. Such disciplines as bio¬
physics, biochemistry, and molecular biology indicate
how the sciences that deal with inorganic bodies under¬
lie the sciences that deal with living organisms.
The same step is taken when we pass from all the
natural to the social and behavioral sciences. The phe¬
nomena with which this group of sciences is con¬
cerned—human behavior, human subgroups, and man’s
social, political, and economic institutions and opera¬
tions—are still more complex.
The ordering of the empirical sciences just given re¬
flects similar orderings in the nineteenth century by Au¬
guste Comte and Herbert Spencer. The same ordering is
to be found in the first five parts of the Propaedia’s Out¬
line of Knowledge.

History, Poetry, and Philosophy

We have so far dealt with only two disciplines in Ba¬
con’s threefold division of learning into history, poetry,

[ 124 ]
 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

and philosophy. We have considered history and philos¬

ophy in relation to one another. But we have not con¬
sidered poetry in relation to history or poetry in relation
to philosophy. It is the latter relationship that is of the
greatest importance for us to understand. Beginning with
Plato, and continuing through the centuries, the age-old
feud between philosophy and poetry deserves pacification.
Like other crucial terms in this discussion, the word
“poetry” has a range of meanings stretching from a very
broad sense to a narrower one, and to one so limited that
it is of little significance for us in this connection. In the
broad sense, derived from the Greek word “poiesis,” po¬
etry stands for all works of fine art with which poetry is
akin—music, painting, sculpture, and so on. In a much
narrower sense, it means all forms of imaginative litera¬
ture, not just lyrics, but narrative fiction in both the epic
and the dramatic manner (novels and plays), whether
written in verse or prose. In the very narrowest sense,
poetry is identified with lyrics written in verse. It is this
use of the term that can be dismissed.
When Bacon divided the realm of learning into his¬
tory, poetry, and philosophy, he clearly had in mind po¬
etry as narrative fiction in all its forms. He could not have
used poetry to stand for all other works of fine art as well
because only imaginative literature, using language as a
medium, is comparable to history and philosophy, both
of which also use language as a medium of expression.
Bacon was not the first to compare poetry with history
and philosophy. Aristotle preceded him, pointing out that
poetry is more philosophical than history because, like
philosophy and unlike history, it deals with universals.
There is more to it than that. History and philosophy
both deal with the actual—history with what has been
and philosophy with what is. Philosophy, however, goes

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Philosophical Illumination

beyond the domain of the actual to the much larger realm

of the possible. It considers not only what is and must
be, but also what can be, but may or may not be.
In this respect poetry is more akin to philosophy than
history is, for poetry deals with what can happen, whereas
history limits itself to what has happened.
The crucial point of difference between philosophical
truth and poetic truth lies in the fact that philosophical
truth consists in the conformity of the knowing mind with
the way things actually are in reality. Poetic truth is bound
only by the limits of the possiblernot by the narrower
confines of the actual.
Ignoring this difference for the moment, we can now
see how closely akin to philosophy poetry is. What Karl
von Clausewitz said about the military leader and the
diplomat applies to the philosopher and the poet. The
latter both seek to achieve the same end, but by different
means. Both aim at an understanding of the whole world.
Poetry does so without analysis and argument, but with
an eloquent use of metaphor, and sometimes with pas¬
sion; philosophy, by means of analysis and argument, but
without metaphorical language and never with passion.
Because they are so closely akin, the rivalry between
poetry and philosophy, from Plato’s day to the present,
has been acute. It can be ameliorated or softened by rec¬
ognizing that, like analysis and argument, passion pays
a role in understanding. Preference for the one rather than
the other is a matter of temperament. The fullest under¬
standing involves both.
To put it another way, poetry is an expression of the
intellectual imagination; philosophy, an expression of the
rational intellect. What is common to them in their gift
to us of understanding is their use of the intellect.
We are thus brought to the conclusion that whatever
place philosophy occupies in the domain of learning,

[ 126 ]
 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

poetry stands there, too—close by, if not in precisely the

same place. Whatever recommendations for the guid¬
ance of learning are to be given with regard to philoso¬
phy apply to poetry as well.

The Transcendental Forms

Matter and form are inseparably correlative. Matter
without form is unintelligible; form without matter is
empty. Form gives intelligibility to matter; matter gives
content to form.
This insight about form and matter has relevance for
us in our consideration of the forms of learning and of
the subject matters that they inform, or to which they give
form. Are history, science, philosophy (and with it po¬
etry) basic forms, each with various subject matters? Can
certain subject matters be common to two or more of these
forms; and are certain subject matters capable of taking
only one form and not others? Which forms are truly
transcendental in the sense of being applicable to all other
forms of learning considered as subject matter and, in
addition, reflexively applicable to themselves?
Some examples may help to make concretely clear what
has just been said so abstractly. We speak of the history
of mankind, the science of man and of human behavior,
and the philosophy of man. Here mankind, humanity,
human being, and human action, name one and the same
subject matter, which can take different forms when hu¬
man affairs are approached historically, scientifically, and
philosophically (or poetically). Similarly, we speak of
natural history, natural science, and the philosophy of
nature—natural phenomena being the common subject
matter of different forms of learning.
We also use such expressions as the history of phys¬
ics, the science of physics, and the philosophy of phys-

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Philosophical Illumination

ics. The phrase “science of physics” cannot be interpreted

in the same way as the phrases “history of physics” and
“philosophy of physics.” The history of physics is a his¬
torical account of the science called physics; so, too, the
philosophy of physics is a philosophical understanding
of the science called physics. In sharp contrast, the phrase
“science of physics” can properly mean only the science
that is physics or, as we have just said, the science that
is called physics.
When physics is considered in the second intention as
referring to the discipline itself, but not to its particular
subject matter, then there is a history of that discipline
and a philosophy of it, but no science of it. Science as a
form does not take other disciplines, second-intention-
ally regarded, as subject matter. The subject matters of
all the physical sciences are the phenomena of inorganic
nature; the subject matter of all the biological sciences,
the phenomena of life and living organisms; the subject
matter of the social sciences, societies and social insti¬
tutions.
Within the realm of the physical sciences we speak of
mechanics as the science of bodies in motion, of optics
as the science of light, or thermodynamics as the science
of heat, and so on. We also speak of the history of me¬
chanics, optics, and thermodynamics. But in that sense
of the word “of,” we cannot speak of the science of me¬
chanics, the science of optics, or the science of thermo¬
dynamics. The meaning of the word “of” is different in
the two cases.
In the phrase “history of mechanics,” the word “of”’
has informative significance. It means that mechanics as
a discipline is the subject matter of the form of learning
that is history. In the phrase “science of mechanics,” the
word “of” does not have informative significance. It does

[ 128 ]
 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

not mean that mechanics as a discipline is the subject

matter of the form of learning that is science.
There is no scientific approach (as there is a historical
and a philosophical approach) to the study of mechanics
as a discipline, considered in itself or second intention¬
ally. In the phrase “science of mechanics” the word “of”
functions simply as a short way of saying “the science
that is mechanics, a study of bodies in motion, which is
one of the physical sciences.”
How very different from science are history and phi¬
losophy as forms of learning. Using the word “of”’ in a
strictly informative sense (relating a form of learning to
the subject matters it informs), we can speak of the his¬
tory of all other forms of learning considered as disci¬
plines in themselves (e.g., the history of science, the
history of philosophy or of poetry, the history of mathe¬
matics, optics, thermodynamics, and so on). Even fur¬
ther, we can speak reflexively of the history of the
discipline that is history itself.
History is thus seen to be a truly transcendental form
of learning, both universally applicable to all forms of
learning and even reflexively applicable to itself. The same
holds true for philosophy. We can speak of the philoso¬
phy of other disciplines—the philosophy of history, the
philosophy of science, the philosophy of poetry or art,
the philosophy of law, the philosophy of medicine. We
can also speak reflexively of the philosophy of philoso¬
phy itself.
In all the foregoing uses of the phrase “philosophy of,”
what is connoted can be expressed by the phrase “un¬
derstanding of.” The same connotation explains the phrase
“philosophy of philosophy” when the form of learning
that is philosophy is applied reflexively to philosophy
itself as a discipline.

[ 129 ]
 *

Philosophical Illumination

Science falls far short of being a transcendental form

like history and philosophy. There is certainly no sci¬
ence of science—no scientific approach to the study of
science as a discipline in itself. Nor is there a science of
history, as there is a history and a philosophy of science.
If the phrase “science of history” is to be given any
meaning at all, it can only have reference to the use of
something akin to scientific method in historical inves¬
tigations.
There can be no science of philosophy as there can be
a philosophy of science—no scientific study of philoso¬
phy as there can be a philosophical understanding of
science. We are hard put to find any meaningful inter¬
pretation of the phrase “science of philosophy.”
As truly transcendental forms of learning, history and
philosophy (and with it poetry) are coordinate with one
another. Science, not being a transcendental form of
learning, is not coordinate with them. However, science
is a basic form of learning even if it is not a transcenden¬
tal form. How, then, does science fit into the picture of
all the basic forms of learning, transcendental or not?
The answer lies in the fact that science and philoso¬
phy as forms of learning do have certain subject matters
in common, principally the phenomena of nature; hu¬
man beings and their behavior; the human mind, its
acts and processes; human society, its institutions and
arrangements. In other words, we have both natural sci¬
ence and a philosophy of nature; scientific and philo¬
sophical anthropology; scientific psychology and a
philosophy of mind; the social sciences and social or po¬
litical philosophy.
Science and philosophy part company with respect to
certain subject matters. Such subjects as light and heat
in the realm of physical phenomena belong only to sci¬
ence. So, too, do such subject matters as cells, digestion,

[ 130 ]
 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

and the nervous system in the realm of biological phe¬

nomena; and such subject matters as economic transac¬
tions and mob behavior in the realm of social phenomena.
They belong only to science.
Understanding this point is so important that I wish to
make it clear in another way. There is a physics of light
(the science that is called optics). There is a physics of
heat (the science that is called thermodynamics). We can,
therefore, also speak of a science of light and a science
of heat. But there is no history of light or heat, no phi¬
losophy of light or heat.
In short, when the subject matter is a special area of
natural or social phenomena, we can, with a few excep¬
tions, have a science of that special subject matter, but
not a history or philosophy of it.* What we can have is
a history or philosophy of this or that discipline which
consists in the scientific study of that particular subject
matter.
The subject matters that belong only to philosophy are
the subject matter of metaphysics (as treating being or
existence in all its modes and the properties of each
mode), and the subject matter of theology (as treating God
and other spiritual beings).
There is still another point at which science and phi¬
losophy as forms of learning part company. Science as a
form of learning consists entirely of descriptive knowl¬
edge—knowledge of what is or happens. When we come
to the phenomena of human behavior, individually and
socially, science gives us knowledge of how men do in
fact behave individually and how they do in fact con¬
duct themselves socially and carry on their social life. As

*The few exceptions that come to mind are the Earth and mankind. We can
have a history of the Earth and of mankind, as well as a science of the Earth
and of man. We can also have a philosophical anthropology.

[ 131 ]
 Philosophical Illumination

contrasted with the descriptive knowledge to be found

in the various behavioral and social sciences, we must
turn to the prescriptive knowledge to be found in moral
and political philosophy. It is this which gives us an un¬
derstanding of how men ought to conduct their individ¬
ual and social lives, or why they should behave in one
way rather than another^
In this account of the four basic forms of learning (his¬
tory, science, and philosophy together with poetry), no
mention has been made of mathematics. It is certainly a
form of learning by virtue of the fact that there are diverse
branches of mathematics, each with its own subject mat¬
ter (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, topology, and
so on). It is just as certainly not a transcendental form.
As a discipline considered in itself, there is a history of
mathematics and a philosophy of mathematics, but no
science of mathematics. The phrase “science of mathe¬
matics” simply means the science that is mathematics,
or the mathematical sciences as a group.
The word “science” is used appropriately here, for
mathematics is much more akin to all the natural sci¬
ences than it is to philosophy. It gives us the kind of
knowledge that consists of know-that and know-what, and
even know-how (the mathematical skills), but not the kind
of knowledge that consists of know-why-and-wherefore.
On the other hand, mathematics does have some kin¬
ship with philosophy in that the objects of pure mathe¬
matics belong to the realm of the possible, as do some of
the objects of philosophy. Of these objects, some enter
into the realm of the actual when mathematics is applied
in the physical, biological, and social sciences. The fact
that mathematics can be applied in the sphere of sci¬
ence, but not in the spheres of history and philosophy,
associates mathematics with science as a form of learn-

[ 132 1
 Indispensable Insights and Distinctions

ing, a form of learning that is basic but not transcendental.

Finally, what about logic? We have already discussed
logic as a liberal art—a skill that is involved in all forms
of learning. There is, of course, a history of logic and a
philosophy of logic, but not a science of logic (except in
the sense expressed by the phrase “the science that is
called logic’’).
One view of logic as a science, not an art, associates it
closely with mathematics or makes it continuous with
mathematics. In another view of logic as a science, it is
either pure or applied. Pure logic was traditionally called
formal logic, and the applications of logic were called
material logic.
Formal logic is concerned with the elements, princi¬
ples, and rules or laws of thought. Material logic consists
of the application of these principles and rules to var¬
ious branches of knowledge. It can also be thought of as
their methodology.
There is a logic or methodology of history, of science,
and of philosophy (but not of poetry). In the sphere of
science, there are different methodologies for diverse
particular sciences, certainly a different methodology in
the natural sciences, on the one hand, and in the social
sciences, on the other hand. In the sphere of philosophy,
the logic or methodology of its speculative (or descrip¬
tive) branches, such as the philosophy of nature and
metaphysics, is different from the logic or methodology of
its practical (or prescriptive) branches, such as ethics and
politics. Thinking about what is, what can be, and what
must be differs from thinking about what ought or ought
not to be sought and done.
The view of logic that makes it continuous with math¬
ematics gives logic the same place in the realm of learn¬
ing that mathematics occupies, a place that is adjunct to

[ 133 ]
 Philosophical Illumination

the place occupied by the natural and social sciences. Like

the sciences to which it is adjunct, it is a basic form of
learning but not transcendental.
The other view of logic as a science, both pure and ap¬
plied, changes its status. Since it is applicable to all other
forms of learning (that is, all except poetry), it would ap¬
pear to have something akin to a transcendental charac¬
ter. Yet it falls short of that, for it is not reflexively
applicable to itself, as history and philosophy are. There
is no logic of logic.

1 134 ]
CHAPTER 15

Recapitulation:
An Aide-Memoire for
the Reader

OF the philosophical insights and distinctions set forth

in the preceding chapter, what should readers bear in
mind as they turn now to the guidelines for a lifetime of
learning that they will find in the Conclusion to follow?
Here are twelve points to remember.
. The four goods of the mind—information, orga-
hriZed knowledge, understanding, and wisdom—ar¬
ranged in an ascending scale of values. That wisdom is
the supreme good of the human mind explains why this
guidebook to learning is for a lifelong pursuit of wisdom.
2. The fourfold differentiation of knowing into 1J know-
that, 2) know-what, 3) know-how, and 4) know-why-and-
wherefore. Of these, the first two dominate the domains
of history, empirical science, and mathematics. The sec¬
ond and fourth belong to philosophy. The third to art and
prudence, which are two additional goods of the mind
in its productive and practical operations.
3. The distinction between a) episteme and b) pai-
deia, i.e., between a) the specialized knowledge or skill
of the expert in some particular field of subject matter,
and b) the general learning and the intellectual skills that
should be the possession of every human being.
4. The misconception of the humanities when they are
 Philosophical Illumination

regarded as whatever subject matters are not covered by

the natural and social sciences. Any intellectual disci¬
pline and any field of learning belongs to the humanities
when it is philosophically approached in the manner of
the generalist for the sake of becoming a generally edu¬
cated human being.
5. The misuse of the word “philosophy” in the Ph.D.
degree to certify the acquirement of specialized compe¬
tence in any field of subject matter outside the domains
of such professional disciplines as law, medicine, and
theology. The Ph.D. degree can be earned for specialized
competence in some branch of philosophical scholar¬
ship, but no academic degree honors a philosophical un¬
derstanding of basic ideas and issues.
6. The difference between art (both fine and useful arts)
and science (and other fields of research or scholarship)
involving the difference between productive know-how
and descriptive know-that, know-what, and know-why-
and-wherefore.
7. The distinction between a) descriptive and explan¬
atory truth, and b) prescriptive and obligatory truth; or
between a) knowing that which is, what it is, and why it
is, and b) knowing what ought to be sought and what
ought to be done to attain it. Only moral and political
philosophy gives us knowledge of the goals we ought to
seek and the means we ought to choose in order to achieve
those goals.
8. The division of the arts into the fine arts or the en¬
joyable arts of the beautiful; and the useful arts that
supply us with tools, instruments, and other utilities. The
arts called liberal are among the useful arts, comprising
all the intellectual skills we need to use language effec¬
tively, to learn anything, and to think about anything.
9. The association of poetry, including all forms of
imaginative literature, with philosophy humanistically

[ 136 ]
 Recapitulation: An Aide-Memoire for the Reader

conceived as the generalist approach to all subject mat¬

ters in the light of basic ideas. They are akin in the ben¬
efits they confer upon us though they differ in the means
they employ to do so. They both give us an understand¬
ing of the world and of ourselves, and insight into the
human condition without which little wisdom can be
gained. Poetry enlightens us by intellectual vision with¬
out analysis and argument, but with eloquent language,
the use of metaphors, and sometimes with passion. Phi¬
losophy enriches our understanding by clarity in analy¬
sis and argument, but eschews metaphorical language and
avoids passion.
10. The primacy of the roles played by poetry and
philosophy in a lifelong pursuit of wisdom. Along with
history, they are the transcendental forms of learning,
applicable to all the objects with which the human mind
is concerned.
11. The secondary importance of all other disciplines
which, though basic, are not transcendental forms of
learning. As fields of specialization, these include all the
empirical sciences, the mathematical sciences, and other
branches of scholarship. They also include historical re¬
search and philosophical scholarship as fields of spe¬
cialization.
12. The transformation of specialized disciplines into
matters appropriate for general education by a human¬
istic approach to them. Any and every field of speciali¬
zation becomes of significance to the generalist in the light
thrown upon it by the history or philosophy of it.
As we shall see in the Conclusion to follow, those who
wish to become specialists in some particular discipline
or subject matter should concentrate on some division of
mathematics or empirical science, some branch of his¬
torical research, or some branch of philosophical schol¬
arship.

[ 137 ]
 *

Philosophical Illumination

Those who wish, in addition, to become generally ed¬

ucated human beings should give primacy to the human¬
istic or generalist approach to all disciplines or subject
matters, with the understanding of them that is con¬
ferred by history, philosophy, and poetry as the tran¬
scendental forms of learning.

[ 138 ]
Conclusion:
Paideia for the
Autodidact

LET me translate into intelligible, and somewhat ex¬

panded, English the briefer Greek in the title of this con¬
clusion: a guide to general learning for those who, after
completing their schooling in youth, aspire to become
generally educated human beings by the self-conducted
learning they carry on in adult life.
The first point of emphasis is indicated by the word
“general,” which as already pointed out is in the con¬
notation of the Greek word “paideia” and its Latin
equivalent “humanitasThose who wish only to be¬
come specialists—to become experts in this or that field
of knowledge or to become competent in one or another
skill—do not need this, or any other, guidebook to learn¬
ing.
If they have no interest in becoming generally edu¬
cated, basic schooling as it now exists, and colleges and
universities as they are now structured, will suffice for
their purposes.
This is especially true of our colleges and universities.
Their catalogues, listing one department after another in
alphabetical order, offer an array of courses in which in¬
dividuals can elect to specialize, in a major and a minor
way, according to their tastes and interests. It is even true
[ 139 ]
 *

Philosophical Illumination

of our high schools, for as now structured they, too, offer

an extraordinary array of elective opportunities for pre¬
mature specialization.
I said earlier in this book that, ideally, everyone should
be both a generalist and a specialist—a generalist first at
the level of basic schooling (K through 12), and also last
in the years after college and university, with becoming
a specialist intermediate between these two stages of one’s
education. That intermediate stage of specialization oc¬
cupies the years spent in college and university.
The program of learning just outlined is the Paideia
ideal, by which I mean the ideal set forth in three books
that I wrote or edited for twenty or more educators in the
Paideia group of which I was chairman. The books are:
The Paideia Proposal (1982), Paideia Problems and Pos¬
sibilities (1983), and The Paideia Program (1984).
If the Paideia ideal were now being actualized in the
elementary and secondary schools of this country, the first
two steps in the program would be realized. Schooling
from kindergarten through grade 12 would initiate the
young in the process of acquiring general, liberal, and
humanistic learning. The colleges and universities to
which some of them then went would afford them op¬
portunity for specialization in a field or fields that they
elected to pursue.
If, when they completed their institutional education,
they realized, as everyone should, that they had not
completed their education, they would continue learn¬
ing in their adult years. Such continued learning should,
of course, be general, not specialized, if they have any
hope of becoming generally educated human beings at the
end of life.
Since the Paideia program, as outlined in the third
Paideia book, describes the content of general learning in
the first stage of institutional education, the present

[ 140 ]
 Conclusion: Paideia for the Autodidact

guidebook need be concerned only with the third stage

of general learning—the stage where the learning is self-
conducted by the mature person who functions as an au¬
todidact (i.e., one who is self-educated).
Unfortunately for those to whom this book is ad¬
dressed, whether they be young or old, the Paideia ideal
is very far from being realized at present. Of what advan¬
tages have they been deprived by this sad fact?
They have been deprived of three things, of which the
first is most important.
1) They have not acquired the liberal arts, the skills of
learning that are indispensable for their pursuit of learn¬
ing, both in educational institutions and thereafter. I have
already enumerated these skills as the four language arts
of reading, writing, speaking, and listening; the skills in¬
volved in mathematical operations; the skills in the var¬
ious procedures of the empirical and experimental
sciences, and more generally the skills operative in
thinking about any subject matter.
2) They have not had the occasion to make a suffi¬
cient initial acquaintance with imaginative literature and
other fine arts, with mathematics as a science, with the
natural sciences, and with history, geography, and social
studies. Their acquaintance with these fields of learning
will have been spotty and inadequate. The information
they acquired in order to pass examinations will soon
have been forgotten. This defect need not be remedied
since, in later life, they can obtain whatever information
they want at one time or another by recourse to reference
books of all sorts.
3) The third deprivation they will have suffered is the
absence from their early schooling of an initial enhance¬
ment of their understanding by the discussion of basic
ideas and issues in seminars that should occur in all
twelve grades from kindergarten on. That initial growth

[ 141 ]
 Philosophical Illumination

of their understanding, if it were to occur, would hardly

be adequate. That most important aspect of their educa¬
tion should be continued in college and university as a
foundation for the general learning to be pursued in all
the later years of life.
To achieve this, our colleges and the graduate or
professional schools of our universities need not sup¬
plant the diverse forms of specialized education they now
offer by substituting truly general education at this higher
level. They need only supplement and ameliorate that
specialized education by adding to it the continuation of
the kind of learning and teaching that involves the en¬
hancement of the understanding. This could be done by
requiring all students at this higher level to participate
in seminars in which basic ideas and issues are dis¬
cussed, regardless of which field of specialization they
are pursuing.
The facts being as they are, our schools, colleges, and
universities are not now turning out specialists who also
have been initiated into the process of becoming gener¬
ally educated. If their graduates are to become generally
educated human beings in the course of their lives, that
will have to be accomplished by their undertaking it for
themselves as autodidacts. What little training they have
received in the liberal arts, or skills of learning, will have
to be supplemented by their own efforts to improve their
ability to read, write, speak, and listen effectively and, in
general, to think effectively.
Given this state of affairs as probably irremediable^ in
the immediate future, I will now try to summarize what
this guide book to learning offers in the way of direction
and guidance for those who still wish to become gener¬
ally educated, in spite of all the deficiencies in their in¬
stitutional education.
As far as the arts are concerned, and apart from the

[ 142 ]
 Conclusion: Paideia for the Autodidact

liberal skills that everyone must make an effort to de¬

velop, the pursuit of general learning should involve some
experience of, and the formation of good taste with re¬
gard to, the objects produced by as many of the fine arts
as possible. Individuals may become specialists in one
or another of these departments of fine art, but that is not
requisite for their general education. What is especially
necessary is the continuation throughout life of the kind
of learning, the kind of understanding that poetry or im¬
aginative literature affords.
In addition to this requirement, the other two forms of
learning, coordinate with learning from poetry, are
learning by the reading of histories and biographies and
by the reading of philosophical books, intended for the
layman and dealing with great ideas and issues. The
branches of philosophical knowledge taught in our col¬
leges and universities are not to the point here. They are
not intended for the layman and they seldom deal with
great ideas and issues. As taught and learned in our col¬
leges and universities, they have become fields of in¬
tense specialization, no different in this respect from the
intense specialization that goes on in logic, mathematics,
the various positive sciences, and the branches of tech¬
nology.
So far I have named all of the transcendental forms of
learning as components in the self-education of adults
who wish to become generally educated human beings.
All these should be pursued under the auspices of phi¬
losophy, meaning thereby that they should be pursued
primarily for the purpose of enlarging one’s understand¬
ing of physical nature, human nature, and human soci¬
ety.
What about the particular positive or empirical sci¬
ences? They enter into continuing self-education that is
generalist rather than specialist in its approach to every-

[ 143 ]
 Philosophical Illumination

thing only to the extent that some understanding of these

disciplines and their subject matters should be a part of
everyone’s general education. In the case of the particu¬
lar empirical sciences, as in the case of history, the
learning to be done should be philosophical in its ap¬
proach—for the sake of understanding the world better,
not for the sake of achieving the competence of an ex¬
pert. That, in the twentieth century, would be impossi¬
ble for anyone to achieve with respect to all the disciplines
and subject matters mentioned.
What, then, shall autodidacts do? How should persons
proceed who wish to conduct for themselves the contin¬
uation of learning after all schooling has been finished?
The answer is in one way very brief and simple. Looked
at another way it is rich and substantial enough to oc¬
cupy a lifetime of learning in the pursuit of wisdom.
The simple answer is: Read and discuss! Never just
read, for reading without discussion with others who have
read the same book is not nearly as profitable as it should
be for the mind in its effort to understand what has been
read. As reading without discussion can fail to yield the
full measure of understanding that should be sought, so
discussion without the substance for discussion that good
and great books afford is likely to degenerate into chit¬
chat or be little more than an exchange of opinions and
personal prejudices.
I have written two books that should prove helpful to
anyone who obeys the injunction to read and discuss.
How to Read a Book, published in 1940 and still cur¬
rently available in a revised edition in paperback, origi¬
nally carried the subtitle “The Art of Getting a Liberal
Education.” Chapter 21 in that book is entitled “Reading
and the Growth of the Mind.”
More recently, I wrote How to Speak/How to Listen,
published in 1983 and now available in paperback. After

[ 144 ]
 Conclusion: Paideia for the Autodidact

setting forth rules that, if followed, make serious discus¬

sion both profitable and pleasant, it contains a conclud¬
ing chapter on the importance of conversation in human
life for the growth of the mind in its pursuit of under¬
standing and wisdom.
Beyond the simple answer—Read and discuss—lies the
richer answer, the answer to the question: What should
be read and discussed? That answer I have tried to pro¬
vide in Appendix III, entitled “Some Books That May Be
Helpful to Autodidacts.’’
There I have recommended a relatively small number
of great books of poetry, history, and philosophy, books
which provide the substance for discussion of great ideas
and issues.
For those who wish to go further, and especially for
those who wish to supplement the great books in the tra¬
dition of Western thought by reading important contem¬
porary works, I have suggested two books that comment
on such works as well as on the great works of the past.
In addition, I have mentioned other books of my own,
philosophical books about ideas, books intended for the
layman, not for professors of philosophy.
If the prescriptions laid down above are followed, what
picture shall we paint to portray the ultimate result? What
would generally educated human beings be like?
They would have sufficient acquaintance with science
and history to give them the knowledge they need to un¬
derstand the world of nature and of man. For that
knowledge to be understood knowledge, not just bare
knowledge, it would have to be enlightened by poetry and
philosophy. All this knowledge and the understanding of 5^jj
it should ultimately lead to the attainment of some^mod- c“v^
icum of wisdom, both practical and theoretical.
In this picture, philosophy and, with it, poetry have a
certain primacy. One reason for this is that the questions

[ 145 ]
 Philosophical Illumination

they raise for us and help us to answer are more impor¬

tant for our lives than the questions raised and answered
by all other disciplines. This is especially true in the realm
of moral and political philosophy—questions about what
goals ought to be sought and what ought to be done to
achieve them, in the conduct of individual lives, in the
direction of human society, and in the improvement of
its institutions.
One other reason for the primacy of philosophy is the
role it plays in relation to religion. The history of diverse
religions and the comparative study of them do not suf¬
fice for those among us who feel that their lives are in¬
complete without a religious aspect or without
participation in a religious community.
For this, a philosophical understanding of religion is
required. Borrowing from the sense in which the Middle
Ages regarded philosophy as the handmaiden of theol¬
ogy, I think it can be said in the twentieth century that
philosophy in general and philosophical theology in
particular lead to the boundary line that separates the
realm of natural knowledge, based on human experience
and reason, from the realm of faith in revealed truth,
which is supernatural knowledge. It takes a leap of faith
to cross that boundary line, but that leap cannot be taken,
or will be taken blindly, unless one has reached that
boundary line in the course of learning. Philosophy, not
history or science, enables one to get there.
With the picture of the generally educated human being
before our eyes, what test or measure can anyone use to
have some assurance that the goal has been achieved with
some degree of approximation, never perfectly of course?
There are undoubtedly many ways of answering this
question. I have one to propose. I think the mark or mea¬
sure of a generally educated human being is that the in-

[ 146 ]
 Conclusion: Paideia for the Autodidact

dividual should feel comfortably at home in the whole

realm of human learning.
Another way of saying this is that individuals should
be able to examine the Propaedia’s synoptic Outline of
Knowledge (see Appendix I) and find nothing there that
totally escapes his understanding. They should also be
able to examine the Syntopicon’s list of the great ideas
and the account of their grouping into subsets (see pp.
96—104], and also feel competent to ask intelligent ques¬
tions about all of them and to engage in a discussion of
the issues they raise.

[ 147 ]
Appendix I

The Propaedia’s
Synoptic Outline
of Knowledge*
Part One. Matter and Energy
Division I. Atoms: Atomic Nuclei and Elementary Particles
111. The Structure and Properties of Atoms
112. The Atomic Nucleus and Elementary Particles
Division II. Energy, Radiation, and the States and Transfor¬
mation of Matter
121. Chemical Elements: Periodic Variation in
Their Properties
122. Chemical Compounds: Molecular Structure
and Chemical Bonding
123. Chemical Reactions
124. Heat, Thermodynamics, and the Nonsolid
States of Matter
125. The Solid State of Matter
126. Mechanics of Particles, Rigid Bodies, and De¬
formable Bodies: Elasticity, Vibrations, and
Flow

*This synoptic outline presents only the forty-two divisions and the 186
sections of the Propaedia’s ten parts. Each of these 186 sections is further sub¬
divided into a number of topics, which represent an analysis of the subject
matter covered in that section of the outline. The complete outline of knowl¬
edge—its ten parts, its forty-two divisions, its 186 sections, and its thousands
upon thousands of topics—occupies 760 pages in the Propaedia.

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 Philosophical Illumination

127. Electricity and Magnetism

128. Waves and Wave Motion
Division III. The Universe: Galaxies, Stars, the Solar System
131. The Cosmos
132. Galaxies and Stars
133. The Solar System

Part Two. The Earth

Division I. The Earth’s Properties, Structure, and Composi¬
tion
211. The Planet Earth
212. The Earth’s Physical Properties
213. The Structure and Composition of the Earth’s
Interior
214. The Earth’s Constituent Minerals and Rocks
Division II. The Earth’s Envelope: Its Atmosphere and Hy¬
drosphere
221. The Atmosphere
222. The Hydrosphere: the Oceans, Freshwater
Bodies, and Ice Masses
223. Weather and Climate
Division III. The Earth’s Surface Features
231. Physical Features of the Earth’s Surface
232. Features Produced by Geomorphic Processes
Acting on the Earth’s Surface
Division IV. The Earth’s History
241. Origin and Development of the Earth and Its
Envelopes
242. The Interpretaion of the Geological Record
243. The Eras and Periods of Geological Time

Part Three. Life on Earth

Division I. The Nature and Diversity of Living Things

311. Characteristics of Living Things
 The Propaedia’s Synoptic Outline of Knowledge

312. The Origin of Life and the Evolution of Living

Things
313. The Classification of Living Things
Division II. The Molecular Basis of Vital Processes
321. Chemicals and the Vital Processes
322. Metabolism: Bioenergetics and Biosynthesis
323. Vital Processes at the Molecular Level

Division III. The Structures and Functions of Organisms

331. The Cellular Basis of Form and Function
332. The Relation of Form and Function in Organ¬
isms
333. Coordination of Vital Processes: Regulation
and Integration
334. Covering and Support: Integumentary, Skele¬
tal, and Musculatory Systems
335. Nutrition: the Procurement and Processing of
Nutrients
336. Gas Exchange, Internal Transport, and Elimi¬
nation
337. Reproduction and Sex
338. Development: Growth, Differentiation, and
Morphogenesis
339. Heredity: the Transmission of Traits
Division IV. Behavioral Responses of Organisms
341. Nature and Patterns of Behavioral Responses
342. Development and Range of Behavioral Capaci¬
ties: Individual and Group Behavior
Division V. The Biosphere: the World of Living Things
351. Basic Features of the Biosphere
352. Biological Populations and Communities
353. Hazards of Life in the Biosphere: Disease and
Death
354. Biogeographic Distribution of Organisms: Eco¬
systems
355. The Place of Humans in the Biosphere

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 Philosophical Illumination

Part Four. Human Life

Division I. Stages in the Development of Human Life on
Earth
411. Human Evolution
412. Human Heredity: the Races of Mankind
Division II. The Human Organism: Health and Disease
421. The Structures and Functions of the Human
Body
422. Human Health
423. Human Diseases
424. The Practice of Medicine and the Care of
Health
Division III. Human Behavior and Experience
431. Human Nature and Experience: General Con¬
siderations
432. Influence of the Current Environment on a
Person’s Behavior and Conscious Experi¬
ence: Attention, Sensation, and Perception
433. Current Internal States Affecting a Person’s
Behavior and Conscious Experience
434. Persisting Capacities and Inclinations That In¬
fluence Human Behavior and Conscious Ex¬
perience
435. Development of a Person’s Potentials: Learn¬
ing and Thinking
436. Personality and the Self: Integration and Dis¬
integration of the Person as a Whole

Part Five. Human Society

Division I. Social Groups: Peoples and Cultures
511. Peoples and Cultures of the World
512. The Development of Human Culture
513. Major Cultural Components and Institutions of
Human Societies
514. Language and Communication
 The Propaedia’s Synoptic Outline of Knowledge

Division II. Social Organization and Social Change

521. Social Structure and Change
522. The Group Structure of Society
523. Social Status
524. Human Populations: Urban and Rural Commu¬
nities

Division III. The Production, Distribution, and Utilization of

Wealth
531. Economic Concepts, Issues, and Systems
532. The Consumer and the Market: Pricing and
the Mechanisms for Distributing Goods
533. The Organization of Production and Distribu¬
tion
534. The Distribution of Income and Wealth
535. Macroeconomics
536. Economic Growth and Planning

Division IV. Politics and Government

541. Political Theory
542. Political Institutions: the Structure, Branches,
and Offices of Government
543. The Functioning of Government: the Dynam¬
ics of the Political Process
544. International Relations: Peace and War

Division V. Law
551. Philosophies and Systems of Law; the Practice
of Law
552. Branches of Public Law, Substantive and Pro¬
cedural
553. Branches of Private Law, Substantive and Pro¬
cedural

Division VI. Education

561. The Aims and Organization of Education
562. Education Around the World

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Philosophical Illumination

Part Six. Art

Division I. Art in General
611. Theory and Classification of the Arts
612. Experience and Criticism of Works of Art; the
Nonaesthetic Contexts of Art
613. Characteristics of the Arts in Particular Cul¬
tures

Division II. The Particular Arts

621. Literature
622. Theatre
623. Motion Pictures
624. Music
625. Dance
626. Architecture, Garden and Landscape Design,
and Urban Design
627. Sculpture
628. Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, and Photogra¬
phy
629. Arts of Decoration and Functional Design

Part Seven. Technology

Division I. The Nature and Development of Technology
711. Technology: Its Scope and History
712. The Organization of Human Work

Division II. Elements of Technology

721. Technology of Energy Conversion and Utiliza¬
tion
722. Technology of Tools and Machines
723. Technology of Measurement, Observation, and
Control
724. Extraction and Conversion of Industrial Raw
Materials
725. Technology of Industrial Production Processes

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 The Propaedia’s Synoptic Outline of Knowledge

Division III. Major Fields of Technology

731. Agriculture and Food Production
732. Technology of the Major Industries
733. Construction Technology
734. Transportation Technology
735. Technology of Information Processing and of
Communications Systems
736. Military Technology
737. Technology of the Urban Community
738. Technology of Earth and Space Exploration

Part Eight. Religion

Division I. Religion in General
811. Knowledge and Understanding of Religion
812. The Religious Life: Institutions and Practices
Division II. The Particular Religions
821. Prehistoric Religion and Primitive Religion
822. Religions of Ancient Peoples
823. Hinduism and Other Religions of India
824. Buddhism
825. Indigenous Religions of East Asia: Religions of
China, Korea, and Japan
826. Judaism
827. Christianity
828. Islam
829. Other Religions and Religious Movements in
the Modern World

Part Nine. The History of Mankind

Division I. Peoples and Civilizations of Ancient Southwest
Asia, North Africa, and Europe
911. Early Peoples and Civilizations of Southwest
Asia and Egypt, the Aegean, and North Af¬
rica

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 Philosophical Illumination

912. Peoples of Ancient Europe and the Classical

Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean
World to a.d. 395
Division II. Peoples and Civilizations of Medieval Europe,
North Africa, and Southwest Asia
921. Western Europe, the Byzantine (Eastern Ro¬
man] Empire, and the States of Eastern Eu¬
rope from A.D. 395 to c. 1050
922. The Empire of the Caliphate and Its Successor
States to c. a.d. 1055
923. Western Christendom in the High and Later
Middle Ages (c. 1050-c. 1500)
924. The Crusading Movement, and Islamic States
of Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Eu¬
rope, and the States of Eastern Christendom
from c. 1050 to c. 1480
Division III. Peoples and Traditional Civilizations of East,
Central, South, and Southeast Asia
931. China to the Beginning of the Late T’ang (a.d.
755)
932. China from the Beginning of the Late T’ang
(a.d. 755) to the Late Ch’ing (c. 1839)
933. Inner (Central and Northeast) Asia to c. 1750
934. Japan to the Meiji Restoration (1868), and Ko¬
rea to 1910
935. The Indian Subcontinent and Ceylon to
c. a.d. 1200
936. The Indian Subcontinent from c. 1200 to 1505
937. The Peoples and Civilizations of Southeast
Asia to c. 1600
Division IV. Peoples and Civilizations of Sub-Saharan Africa
to 1885
941. West Africa to c. 1885
942. The Nilotic Sudan and Ethiopia from
c. a.d. 550 to 1885
943. East Africa and Madagascar to c. 1885

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 The Propaedia’s Synoptic Outline of Knowledge

944. Central Africa to c. 1885

945. Southern Africa to c. 1885
Division V. Peoples and Civilizations of Pre-Columbian
America
951. Andean Civilization to c. a.d. 1540
952. Meso-American Civilization to c. a.d. 1540
Division VI. The Modern World to 1920
961. Western Europe from c. 1500 to c. 1789
962. Eastern Europe, Southwest Asia, and North
Africa from c. 1480 to c. 1800
963. Europe from 1789 to c. 1920
964. European Colonies in the Americas from 1492
to c. 1790
965. Development of the United States and Canada
from 1763 to 1920
966. Development of the Latin-American and Carib¬
bean Nations to c. 1920
967. Australia and Oceania to c. 1920
968. South Asia under the Influence of European
Imperialism from c. 1500 to c. 1920
969. Southeast Asia Under the Influence of Euro¬
pean Imperialism to c. 1920
96/10. China from 1839 Until the Onset of Revolu¬
tion (to c. 1911), and Japan from the Meiji
Restoration to c. 1910
96/11. Southwest Asia and North Africa (c. 1800-
1920), and Sub-Saharan Africa (1885-
c. 1920) Under the Influence of European
Imperialism: the Early Colonial Period
Division VII. The World Since 1920
971. International Movements, Diplomacy, and War
Since 1920
972. Europe Since c. 1920
973. The United States and Canada Since 1920
974. Latin-American and Caribbean Nations Since
c. 1920

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 Philosophical Illumination

975. East Asia: China in Revolution, the Era of Jap¬

anese Hegemony, and the Influence of the
United States in the Twentieth Century
976. South and Southeast Asia: the Late Colonial
Period and the Emergence of New Nations
Since 1920
977. Australia and Oceania Since 1920
978. Southwest Asia and Africa: the Late Colonial
Period and the Emergence of New Nations
in the Twentieth Century

Part Ten. The Branches of Knowledge

Division I. Logic
10/11. History and Philosophy of Logic
10/12. Formal Logic, Metalogic, and Applied Logic

Division II. Mathematics

10/21. History and Foundations of Mathematics
10/22. Branches of Mathematics
10/23. Applications of Mathematics
Division III. Science
10/31. History and Philosophy of Science
10/32. The Physical Sciences
10/33. The Earth Sciences
10/34. The Biological Sciences
10/35. Medicine and Affiliated Disciplines
10/36. The Social Sciences and Psychology
10/37. The Technological Sciences
Division IV. History and the Humanities
10/41. Historiography and the Study of History
10/42. The Humanities and Humanistic Scholarship
Division V. Philosophy
10/51. History of Philosophy
10/52. The Nature and the Divisions of Philosophy
10/53. Philosophical Schools and Doctrines
Appendix II

Ortega on the Barbarism

of Specialization

[The scientist who] is only acquainted with one science, and

even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is
an active investigator . . . even proclaims it as a virtue that he
takes no cognisance of what lies outside the narrow territory
specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of “dilet¬
tantism” to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.

Anyone who wishes can observe the stupidity of thought,

judgment, and action shown today in politics, art, religion, and
the general problems of life and the world by the “men of sci¬
ence,” and, of course, behind them, the doctors, engineers, fi¬
nanciers, teachers, and so on.

Compared with the medieval university, the contemporary

university has developed the mere seed of professional in¬
struction into an enormous activity; it has added the function
of research; and it has abandoned almost entirely the teaching
or transmission of culture.

[The citizen] is the new barbarian. . . . This new barbarian is

above all the professional man, more learned than ever before,
but at the same time more uncultured—the engineer, the phy¬
sician, the lawyer, the scientist.
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Philosophical Illumination

“General culture.” The absurdity of the term, its Philistinism,

betrays its insincerity. “Culture,” referring to the human mind
and not to stock or crops, cannot be anything else but general.
There is no being “cultured”\n physics or mathematics. That
would mean simply to be learned in a particular subject. The
usage of the expression “general culture” shows an underly¬
ing notion that the student ought to be given some ornamental
knowledge, which in some way is to educate his moral char¬
acter or his intellect. For so vague a purpose, one discipline is
as good as another, among those that are more or less indefi¬
nite and not so technical—like philosophy, or history, or so¬
ciology!

Civilization has had to await the beginning of the twentieth

century, to see the astounding spectacle of how brutal, how
stupid, and yet how aggressive is the man learned in one thing
and fundamentally ignorant of all else. Professionalism and
specialism, through insufficient counterbalancing, have smashed
the European man in pieces; and he is consequently missing
at all the points where he claims to be, and is badly needed.

Let us cast away once [and] for all those vague notions of en¬
lightenment and culture, which make them appear as some sort
of ornamental accessory for the life of leisure. There could not
be a falser misrepresentation. Culture is an indispensable ele¬
ment of life, a dimension of our existence, as much a part of
man as his hands; . . . but that is no longer simply man: it is
man crippled. The same is to be said of life without culture,
only in a much more fundamental sense. It is a life crippled,
wrecked, false. The man who fails to live at the height of his
times is living beneath what would constitute his right life. Or
in other words, he is swindling himself out of his own life.

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Appendix III

Some Books That May Be

Helpful to Autodidacts

I have divided my recommendations into three parts. The first

set, A, concerns works of imaginative literature, history or bi¬
ography, and philosophy. The second, B, mentions three “how¬
to” books that I have written about the liberal arts. The third,
C, also recommends some books of mine about the great ideas.

Great Books of the Western World (54 volumes)

Of the seventy-four authors included in this set of books,
I recommend as a starter the following relatively short list.

Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey

Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus Rex
Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian War
Plato: The Apology, The Republic
Aristotle: Ethics, Politics
Tacitus: The Annals
Plutarch: The Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans
Augustine: Confessions
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Montaigne: Essays
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 Philosophical Illumination

Machiavelli: The Prince

Pascal: Pensees
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear
Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
). S. Mill: Representative Government
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Melville: Moby Dick
William James: The Principles of Psychology

To supplement the foregoing, I suggest two much more far-

ranging lists of recommended readings that include outstand¬
ing books written in the twentieth century.

Clifton Fadiman: Lifetime Reading Plan

Charles Van Doren: The Joy of Reading

How to Read a Book (the second edition, in the writ¬

ing of which Charles Van Doren was my collabora¬
tor)
How to Speak/How to Listen
The Paideia Program (which contains essays by other
members of the Paideia group as well as by me)

Six Great Ideas

A Vision of the Future: Twelve Ideas for a Better Life
and a Better Society
How to Think About God
Ten Philosophical Mistakes

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 Some Books That May Be Helpful to Autodidacts

Here I would also recommend the 102 essays on the great ideas
that I wrote for the Syntopicon, which is included in Great
Books of the Western World.

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