The Lessons of History is a short work of synthesis by Will and Ariel Durant, distilled from the decades they spent writing their multi-volume Story of Civilization. Published in the late 1960s, it gathers into a handful of compact chapters what the long narrative survey seemed to teach about human nature, the conduct of states, and the likely course of future affairs. The form is expository throughout: not a chronicle but a series of essays, each taking up one lens—the earth, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, government, war—and asking what the record of the past suggests under that head.
“Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”
The preface sets the tone. Having finished their ten volumes up to 1789, the Durants reread them hoping to correct errors of omission and fact, and found themselves marking events and remarks that seemed to throw light on present conditions and future probabilities. They admit that conclusions formed in advance probably shaped which illustrations they chose, and they claim no originality: the aim is inclusiveness, a survey of human experience rather than a personal revelation. Their references back to the Story volumes are offered as instances, not authorities.
The Historian’s Doubt
Will and Ariel Durant close their massive Story of Civilization and then step back to ask what the whole enterprise has taught them. The preface explains the origin of this small book: while rereading their ten volumes with an eye to a corrected edition, they kept noticing events and remarks that seemed to throw light on present affairs, on human nature, and on the conduct of states. They confess that they meant to postpone conclusions until the survey was done, but suspect that opinions formed in advance shaped which examples they chose. The essay, they warn, repeats ideas voiced before by themselves and by others; its aim is inclusiveness rather than originality, a survey of human experience rather than a private revelation.
The opening chapter gives doubt its full hearing. Has the historian learned anything more of human nature than the man in the street? Can he predict the fate of states, or does history teach nothing, the past being merely a rehearsal of future mistakes on a larger scale? Do we even know what happened, or is history “a fable” not quite agreed upon? Knowledge of any past event is incomplete and probably inaccurate, clouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, distorted by patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.” Even the historian who rises above partiality betrays his leanings in his choice of materials and the shade of his adjectives, simplifying as he must by selecting a manageable minority of facts from a multitudinous complexity.
The acceleration of change makes inference from past to future more hazardous still. In 1909 Charles Péguy thought the world had changed less since Jesus Christ than in the previous thirty years; a young physicist of the Durants’ day might say his science had changed more since 1909 than in all recorded time before. Chance, perhaps freedom, enters the conduct of metals and of men. Electrons, like Cowper’s God, move in mysterious ways, and some quirk of character or circumstance may upset a national equation—as when Alexander drank himself to death and let his new empire fall apart in 323 B.C., or when Frederick the Great was saved from ruin by the accession of a Czar infatuated with Prussian ways in 1762. Historiography, then, cannot be a science; it can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy. “The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” We know only a fraction of man’s history—there were probably civilizations before Sumer and Egypt, and we have only begun to dig. Within these limits, the Durants suggest, we may learn enough to bear reality patiently and to respect one another’s delusions. Man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth; under the headings of astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war, they propose to ask what history says about his nature, conduct, and prospects. Only a fool would compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. “We proceed.”
History and the Earth
Human history, they begin, is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty. A comet may come too close and turn the globe topsy-turvy, or a fragment of the sun may slip off tangentially and fall upon us. To the cosmos they answer in Pascal’s words: when the universe has crushed him, man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.
History is subject to geology. Every day the sea encroaches on land or land on sea; cities disappear under water, and sunken cathedrals ring their bells. Mountains rise and fall in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers swell and flood.
The Case for Racial Superiority
From the earth the argument turns to race, and the Durants give the racial theorists their fullest hearing before dismantling them. With some two billion “colored” people and nine hundred million whites on earth, many “palefaces” welcomed Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–55), which claimed mankind consists of distinct races inherently different in physical structure, mental capacity, and character, with the “Aryan” race naturally superior. All great, noble, or fruitful works of man, Gobineau held, derive from a single germ belonging to one family; all civilization derives from the white race, and society is great only insofar as it preserves the noble blood that created it. Environment cannot explain civilization’s rise, since the same river-watered lands that produced Egypt and the Near East produced nothing among North American Indians; nor can institutions, since civilization arose under contrary ones—monarchical Egypt and “democratic” Athens. Rise and fall depend on inherent racial quality, and degeneration means falling away from the stock through mixtures of blood, usually by intermarriage of the vigorous race with conquered peoples. Hence, he argued, whites in the United States and Canada, who did not intermarry with Indians, are superior to whites in Latin America, who did. Only the products of such mixtures talk of racial equality or that “all men are brothers”; strong peoples are race-conscious and instinctively averse to marrying outside their group.
In 1899 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman settled in Germany, published Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, narrowing the creative race from Aryans to Teutons and declaring that true history begins when the German seizes antiquity’s inheritance. Dante’s face struck him as German; he heard German accents in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians; unsure whether Christ was German, he was confident that whoever maintains Christ was a Jew is “either ignorant or dishonest.” German writers did not contradict their guest: Treitschke and Bernhardi admitted Germans were the greatest modern peoples; Wagner set the theory to music; Alfred Rosenberg made German blood and soil the “myth of the twentieth century”; and Adolf Hitler, on this basis, roused Germans to slaughter a people and attempt the conquest of Europe.
Madison Grant, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), confined civilization’s achievements to the “Nordics”—Scandinavians, Baltic Germans, Englishmen, Anglo-Saxon Americans. Cooled to hardness by northern winters, these fair-haired, blue-eyed “blond beasts” swept through Russia and the Balkans into the lethargic South. Grant held that the Sacae invaded India, developed Sanskrit as “Indo-European,” and established caste to prevent deterioration through intermarriage with dark native stocks; that Cimmerians poured into Persia, Phrygians into Asia Minor, Achaeans and Dorians into Greece and Crete, Umbrians and Oscans into Italy. Nordics were adventurers, warriors, disciplinarians; they enslaved “Mediterranean” peoples and intermarried with “Alpine” stocks to produce the Athenians of Pericles and the Romans of the Republic. The Dorians intermarried least and became the Spartans ruling “Mediterranean” helots; intermarriage weakened Attica’s Nordic stock and led to Athens’ defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and Greece’s subjugation by Macedonia and Republican Rome. Further inundations followed: Goths and Vandals conquered Imperial Rome; Angles and Saxons conquered England, giving it a new name; Franks conquered Gaul, giving it theirs; Normans conquered France, England, and Sicily; Lombards vitalized Milan and Florence into a Renaissance; Varangians ruled Russia till 1917; Englishmen colonized America and Australia, conquered India, and set sentinels in Asiatic ports.
Grant mourned that the Nordic race was abandoning mastery. It lost footing in France in 1789, when Camille Desmoulins told his café audience that the Revolution was a revolt of indigenous Gauls against Teutonic Franks who had subjugated them under Clovis and Charlemagne. The Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the First World War depleted Nordic stock, leaving it too thin to resist higher Alpine and Mediterranean birth rates. Grant predicted the Nordics would fall from power by 2000 and Western civilization would disappear in a new barbarism. He conceded that the Mediterranean “race,” inferior in bodily stamina, proved superior in intellectual and artistic attainments—crediting it for classic Greece and Rome, though it may have owed much to Nordic intermarriage.
History Is Color-Blind
The weaknesses in the theory are, the Durants note, obvious. A Chinese scholar would cite his people’s enduring civilization from 2000 B.C.; a Mexican scholar would point to Mayan, Aztec, and Incan structures; a Hindu scholar, acknowledging “Aryan” infiltration into north India some sixteen hundred years before Christ, would recall that the black Dravidic peoples of south India produced great builders and poets—the temples of Madras, Madura, and Trichinopoly—and the shrine of the Khmers at Angkor Wat. History is color-blind and can develop civilization under almost any skin. Even confining the theory to whites, difficulties remain: Semites would recall Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Palestine, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Islam; Jews gave Europe the Bible and Christianity and much of the Koran to Mohammed; Mohammedans could list rulers, artists, poets, scientists, and philosophers who adorned the white man’s world from Baghdad to Cordova while Western Europe groped through the Dark Ages. The ancient cultures of Egypt follow in the same vein.
The Receding Bases of Morals
The argument shifts to morality, and to the forces that have loosened the old codes. The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry; rebellious youth escaped village surveillance and hid sins in the anonymity of the city crowd. The progress of science raised the authority of the test tube over the crosier; mechanization suggested mechanistic, materialistic philosophies; education spread religious doubts; morality lost its supernatural supports, and the old agricultural moral code began to die.
In our time, as in the times of Socrates and Augustus, war has added to the forces making for moral laxity. After the Peloponnesian War, Alcibiades flouted his ancestors’ moral code and Thrasymachus announced that might was the only right. After the wars of Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavius, Rome was full of men who had lost economic footing and moral stability—soldiers who had learned to kill, citizens whose savings were consumed by war taxes and inflation, women dizzy with freedom multiplying divorces, abortions, and adulteries; a shallow sophistication prided itself on pessimism and cynicism. The resemblance to European and American cities after two world wars is left for the reader to draw.
History consoles, they suggest, by showing that sin has flourished in every age: homosexualism in ancient Greece, Rome, and Renaissance Italy, where the humanists wrote of it with scholarly affection, Ariosto judged them all addicted, and Aretino asked the Duke of Mantua for an attractive boy; prostitution from Assyrian state brothels to modern “night clubs”; bold girls at the University of Wittenberg in 1544, per Luther; obscene literature in Montaigne’s time; a stage differing in kind rather than degree from Restoration England; Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as popular in 1749 as in 1965; dice found near Nineveh; dishonesty and corrupt government in every age—probably less now. Sixteenth-century pamphlet literature groaned with denunciations of food adulteration. Man has never reconciled himself to the Ten Commandments; Voltaire saw history as crimes, follies, and misfortunes, and Gibbon echoed him.
History as written differs from history as lived, because historians record the exceptional—it is what interests them. Behind the red facade of war, politics, misfortune, poverty, adultery, divorce, murder, and suicide were millions of orderly homes and devoted marriages.
The Improbable Russian Revolution and the Convergence of Systems
Why did modern socialism first take root in Russia, a country where capitalism was still in its infancy and no great corporations existed to make the leap to state control relatively painless? Centuries of peasant poverty and intellectual revolt had prepared the ground, yet the peasants had only been freed from serfdom in 1861, and the intelligentsia had leaned toward an anarchism hostile to any all-absorbing state. The revolution of 1917 probably succeeded because the Czarist government had been defeated and disgraced by war and mismanagement; the economy had collapsed into chaos, peasants came home from the front carrying rifles, and Lenin and Trotsky had been handed safe conduct and a warm farewell by the German government. Communism took its particular form because the new state was beset by internal disorder and foreign attack; a people under siege will set aside individual freedom until order and security return. Communism, in this reading, was a war economy—and it may survive only through the continued fear of war, for a generation of peace would presumably erode it through the sheer nature of man.
Socialism in Russia now restores individualistic motives to stimulate production and grant its people more physical and intellectual liberty, while capitalism undergoes a matching process of limiting private acquisition through semi-socialistic legislation and the redistribution of wealth we call the welfare state. Marx, the argument goes, was an unfaithful disciple of Hegel: he read the dialectic as a struggle destined to end in the total victory of socialism, but apply thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to the Industrial Revolution and to the contest of capitalism and socialism, and the third stage becomes a blend of both—precisely the reconciliation toward which the Western world visibly moves. Year by year the state’s role in the economy rises and the private sector’s share declines. Capitalism keeps the stimulus of private property, free enterprise, and competition, producing goods in rich supply; heavy taxation falling on the upper classes lets government provide unprecedented services in education, health, and recreation. Fear of capitalism has pushed socialism to widen freedom; fear of socialism has pushed capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
The Case for Government and the Record of Monarchy
Pope thought only a fool would dispute over forms of government, and history has a good word for all of them—and for government itself. Men love freedom, but freedom in society requires some regulation of conduct; the first condition of freedom is its limitation, and absolute freedom dies in chaos. The prime task of government is to establish order, since organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable private force. Power naturally converges to a center because it is ineffective when divided and diluted, as Poland discovered under the liberum veto; hence the centralization achieved by Richelieu or Bismarck over the protests of feudal barons has drawn historians’ praise. The United States followed the same path, federal power growing as the economy ignored state boundaries and could be regulated only from the center. Today international government develops as industry, commerce, and finance override frontiers.
Monarchy seems the most natural form, applying to the group the authority of the father in a family or the chieftain in a warrior band; judged by prevalence and duration, monarchy takes the palm, while democracies have been hectic interludes. After Roman democracy broke down in the class wars of the Gracchi, Marius, and Caesar, Augustus organized what was in effect monarchical rule and achieved the greatest feat of statesmanship in history—the Pax Romana, which kept peace from 30 B.C. to A.D. 180 across an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. Monarchy then disgraced itself under Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, but there followed Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—”the finest succession of good and great sovereigns,” Renan called them, “that the world has ever had.” Gibbon said that to fix the period when the human race was happiest and most prosperous, a man would without hesitation name the span from Nerva’s accession to the death of Marcus Aurelius, reigns in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government. That brilliant age practiced adoptive monarchy: the emperor passed his authority not to his offspring but to the ablest man he could find, adopted him, trained him, and gradually surrendered the reins. The system worked partly because neither Trajan nor Hadrian had a son, and the sons of Antoninus Pius died in childhood. Marcus Aurelius had a son, Commodus, who succeeded him because the philosopher failed to name another heir; soon chaos was king. Monarchy’s overall record is middling: wars of succession brought as much evil as legitimacy brought good, and hereditary rule breeds stupidity, nepotism, irresponsibility, and extravagance more reliably than nobility or statesmanship.
Democracy’s Promise and Its Perils
Athens and Rome stand as the most creative cities in history, and America, in two centuries, has provided abundance for an unprecedentedly large share of its people. Democracy has dedicated itself to spreading and lengthening education and to maintaining public health; if equality of educational opportunity is established, democracy will be real and justified. Beneath its catchwords lies a vital truth: men cannot be equal, but their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. The rights of man are not rights to office and power but rights of entry into every avenue that may nourish and test a man’s fitness for office and power; a right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege it is good for the group that the individual should have. Democracy is sounder than ever in England, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada, having defended itself against foreign dictatorship without yielding to dictatorship at home. Three dangers remain: war may absorb and dominate it, so that the itch to rule the world demands a large military establishment and democratic freedoms succumb one by one to the discipline of arms; race or class war may divide people into hostile camps until one side overturns the hustings with the sword; and if the economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship lies open to any man who persuasively promises security to all.
War as the Constant of History
War is a constant of history, undiminished by civilization or democracy; of the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war. War is the present ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human species—Heracleitus’s “war, or competition, is the father of all things,” the source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, preservable only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power. The causes of war mirror individual competition: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery. The state has our instincts without our restraints—the individual submits to morals and laws and replaces combat with conference because the state guarantees his life, property, and legal rights, but the state acknowledges no substantial restraint, defying interference when strong enough or lacking any superstate, international law, or moral code with effective force. Pride in the individual parallels nationalism in the state; when European states freed themselves from papal overlordship, each encouraged nationalism as a supplement to army and navy, fomenting hatred of foreseen enemies with catchwords while stressing love of peace.
This conscription of the soul to international phobia occurred only in the most elemental conflicts and was seldom resorted to in Europe between the Religious Wars of the sixteenth century and the Wars of the French Revolution. In that interval, peoples of conflicting states respected one another’s achievements; Englishmen traveled safely in France while the two nations were at war, and the French and Frederick the Great admired each other while fighting the Seven Years’ War. War in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a contest of aristocracies rather than peoples. The twentieth century, with improved communication, transport, weapons, and indoctrination, made war a struggle of peoples involving civilians and combatants alike, winning victory through wholesale destruction of property and life; a single war can now destroy centuries of city-building, art, and civilized habit. War promotes science and technology, whose deadly inventions may later enlarge the material achievements of peace—if they are not forgotten in universal destitution and barbarism.
Generals and rulers, with rare exceptions like Ashoka and Augustus, have smiled at philosophers’ timid dislike of war; in the military interpretation, war is the final arbiter, accepted as natural and necessary by all but cowards and simpletons. Charles Martel’s victory at Tours in 732 kept France and Spain from becoming Mohammedan; arms protected the classic heritage against Mongol and Tatar invasion. Generals who die in bed are laughed at, yet statues rise to those who turn back a Hitler or a Genghis Khan. The general’s argument runs that more young men die in automobile accidents than in war, that many riot and rot for lack of discipline, that they need an outlet for combativeness and adventurousness and weariness with routine; if they must die, why not for their country in the anesthesia of battle and the aura of glory? Even a philosopher who knows history will admit that a long peace may fatally weaken a nation’s martial muscles; with international law and sentiment inadequate, a nation must be ready to defend itself and use any means necessary to survival—the Ten Commandments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake. The United States, in this view, must assume the task Great Britain performed in the nineteenth century, protecting Western civilization from external danger, while Communist governments armed with old birth rates and new weapons proclaim their resolve to destroy the economy and independence of non-Communist states. Young nations longing for an Industrial Revolution are impressed by Russia’s rapid industrialization under governmental management; Western capitalism might prove more productive in the end but seems slower, and new governors eager to control resources and manpower are likely prey to Communist propaganda and subversion. Unless halted, nearly all Asia, Africa, and South America will fall under Communist leadership.
The Twilight of Faith and the Death of Civilizations
As education spreads, theologies lose credence and retain only an external conformity, without influence on conduct or hope; life and ideas grow secular, ignoring supernatural explanations and fears, and the moral code loses its aura and force as its human origin is revealed and divine surveillance and sanctions are removed. In ancient Greece the philosophers destroyed the old faith among the educated classes, and in many nations of modern Europe philosophers have achieved similar results—Protagoras paired with Voltaire, Diogenes with Rousseau, Democritus with Hobbes, Plato with Kant, Thrasymachus with Nietzsche, Aristotle with Spencer, Epicurus with Diderot. In antiquity and modernity alike, analytical thought dissolved the religion that had buttressed the moral code; new religions came but were divorced from the ruling classes and gave no service to the state. An age of weary skepticism and epicureanism followed the triumph of rationalism over mythology in the last century before Christianity, and follows a similar victory today in the first century after Christianity.
Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the next, an unmoored generation surrenders to luxury, corruption, and restless disorder of family and morals, all but a remnant clinging to old restraints. Few souls feel that it is beautiful and honorable to die for one’s country. A failure of leadership may let a state weaken itself with internal strife; at the end, a decisive defeat in war may bring the final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism welling up from within to close the civilization. This is not wholly depressing: life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in individuals or states; death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind takes no offense. Civilizations do not quite die. Greek civilization is not really dead—only its frame is gone, its habitat changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race so abundantly that no one life could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land; Greek poets and philosophers stand in every library and college; Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the dear delight of philosophy. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities.
What the Survey Concludes About Human Nature
Running beneath the individual chapters is a settled view of what people are. The Durants treat man as a composite—body, character, and mind—lodged in a family, a community, a faith, an economy, and a state, and they insist that no single lens explains him. Inequality is the hardest of their findings: nature dooms many to poverty or defeat, and because that is so, supernatural hope may be the only alternative to despair. This is why they refuse to dismiss religion as mere superstition. It comforts the unhappy and the old, helps parents and teachers discipline the young, and gives meaning to the lowliest existence; heaven and utopia are buckets in a well, they write, and when one goes down the other goes up.
Morality, in their account, has no fixed supernatural anchor and yet cannot be discarded. They note that sin has flourished in every age—prostitution from Assyrian state brothels onward, obscene literature, corrupt government—and that historians record the exceptional because it is interesting, so the written record exaggerates vice. Behind the red facade of war and crime were millions of orderly homes and devoted marriages. What worries them is not that people are wicked but that an old agricultural moral code has lost its economic base and its religious supports, and industry has yet to forge a replacement. They decline to read this as certain decay; civilizations decay leisurely, and Greece kept producing masterpieces for two and a half centuries after its moral weakening began.
The Case Against Certainty
The book’s most distinctive intellectual move is its suspicion of grand systems. Historiography, the Durants say, cannot be a science; it can only be an industry of ferreting out facts, an art of imposing meaningful order on chaos, and a philosophy seeking perspective. Knowledge of any past event is incomplete and clouded by biased evidence and partisan historians—”most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.” Conclusions drawn from past to future are made more hazardous by the acceleration of change, and by the element of chance and freedom that enters the conduct of metals and men: an Alexander drinks himself to death and his empire falls apart; a czar infatuated with Prussian ways saves Frederick the Great from disaster. History, they conclude, smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns; it is baroque. Yet within these limits we may learn enough to bear reality patiently and respect one another’s delusions.
This skepticism cuts against the era’s confident ideologies. The race theorists—Gobineau, Chamberlain, Grant—are given their say and then quietly dismantled: history is color-blind, they observe, and can develop civilization under almost any skin, as the temples of south India and the shrines of the Khmers attest. Marx receives the same treatment. Economic interest is a powerful force, but he underestimated religious fervor, nationalistic ardor, and mob fury, and sometimes political or military power was the cause rather than the result of economic arrangements. The Bolshevik seizure of Russia in 1917 was not the inevitable fruit of mature capitalism; it succeeded because a defeated and disgraced government had collapsed into chaos.
A Rhythm Rather Than a Direction
What replaces the systems is a pattern of oscillation. The concentration of wealth, the Durants argue, is natural and recurs wherever economic freedom exists; despotism may retard it, democracy accelerates it. When the many poor begin to rival the few rich, the crisis is met either by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty. Solon’s reforms saved Athens from revolution; the Roman Senate’s refusal to compromise bought a hundred years of class and civil war. All economic history, they write, is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
The same reconciling instinct governs their reading of politics. Monarchy has the longest record and a middling one; democracy has been sounder than ever in the nations that kept it, but it faces three dangers—war absorbing it, race or class war dividing it into hostile camps, and an economy of freedom that fails to distribute what it has created. Their hope lies in synthesis: capitalism compelled by fear of socialism to increase equality, socialism compelled by fear of capitalism to widen freedom, until East and West meet. War they treat as a constant—only 268 of the last 3,421 years have seen no war—the ultimate form of competition, with peace an unstable equilibrium preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The closing question is whether progress is real, and the answer is carefully hedged. Science is neutral, killing as readily as healing; comforts may have weakened the fiber that produced them; we may be the same trousered apes at two thousand miles an hour. But civilizations do not quite die. Greek civilization survives not as a frame but as a memory spread across the race—Homer has more readers now than in his own day, and Plato is studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of philosophy. This selective survival of creative minds is, for the Durants, the most real of immortalities. Nations die and resilient man picks up his tools and moves on; if education has deepened his memories, civilization migrates with him and builds another home. Commerce and print, wires and waves bind nations together, preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind. It is a modest conclusion, offered by two historians who spent a lifetime in the record and came out respecting its resistance to formulas.
