Bestsellers, American, 1895-1923
This is an essay--not a treatise--on the most important of all matters of human concern. Although it has cost its author a great deal more thought and labor than will be apparent, it falls, in his estimation, far below the demands of its implacably urgent theme. Each page coul...
I remember years ago attending a public dinner to which the Governor of the state was bidden. The chairman explained that His Excellency could not be present for certain "good"...
11. Part 11Such are some of the obstacles which the student of human affairs must surmount. Yet we may hope that it will become increasingly clear that the repression of criticism (even if...
5. Part 5We have no means of knowing when or where the first contribution to civilization was made, and with it a start on the arduous building of the mind. There is some reason to think...
4. Part 4The "real" reasons, which explain how it is we happen to hold a particular belief, are chiefly historical. Our most important opinions--those, for example, having to do with tra...
6. Part 6The chief strength of the Greeks lay in their freedom from hampering intellectual tradition. They had no venerated classics, no holy books, no dead languages to master, no autho...
9. Part 9As if these changes were not astounding enough, now has come the chemist who devotes himself to making not new _commodities_ (or old ones in new ways), but new _substances_. He...
7. Part 7The second, or "Dark Age", lasted with only slight improvement from Augustine to Abélard, about seven hundred years. The prosperous _villas_ disappeared; towns vanished or shriv...
8. Part 8St. Augustine, who had led a free life as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage and Rome, came in his later years to believe, as he struggled to overcome his youthful temptations, t...
1. Part 1This is an essay--not a treatise--on the most important of all matters of human concern. Although it has cost its author a great deal more thought and labor than will be apparen...
2. Part 2Now education for citizenship would seem to consist in gaining a knowledge of the actual workings of our social organization, with some illuminating notions of its origin, toget...
10. Part 10The prosperity of the United States is to be attributed largely to the excellence of the Federal Constitution and the soundness of her democratic institutions. Class privileges...
12. Part 12No doubt politics and economics could be taught, and are being taught, better as time goes on. Neither of them are so utterly unreal and irrelevant to human proceedings as they...