William James Durant: Philosophy to History
Jim Safley

Ariel Durant wrote of her husband, William James Durant: “History as he saw it was a part of philosophy; it provided data toward the understanding of man, as science provided data for the understanding of nature; here, as in the old adage, history was to be philosophy teaching by example.”[1] Durant straddled the thin line between philosophy and history and recognized their interdependence. Accordingly, this paper will delve into Durant’s philosophy, drawing from it his outlook on history.

INFLUENCES

William James Durant was born on November 5, 1885 in North Adams, Massachusetts. His parents, of French-Canadian decent, were fierce Catholics who aspired for him to become a priest. Beginning his formal education in parochial schools, Durant was accepted by scholarship into St. Peters College, a Jesuit Catholic school. After a few years of intense study and reflection he began to question religion. As a well-read student he familiarized himself with the works of “infidels” including Charles Darwin, Upton Sinclair, and Edward Bellamy. The earth-shattering revelations and groundbreaking sciences of these authors inspired him to relinquish his beliefs in heaven as well as question the political state of America. The popular socialist movement of the early twentieth century aroused his interest considerably, occupying much of his young mind. From religion, he “turned with religious fervor to faith in a socialist utopia.”[2]

At first, Durant was secret in his fervor; he dared not expose such a heart-breaking betrayal to his parents or the Jesuits. Eventually his secret was exposed when a pro-socialist letter he had written to the Jersey City Evening Journal came to the Jesuit’s attention. It appalled his parents and disheartened the Jesuits. Disheartened himself, and without a source of income, Durant found a position as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal. However, the Jesuits were merciful and offered him a job teaching Latin, French, and Geometry at Seton Hall College. For a year he brooded whether to enter seminary. In a rush of vain inspiration he pretended to abandon his heresies and entered the seminary with the ambitious goal to lead the Catholic Church into “cooperation with the socialist movement.”[3]

Durant entered the seminary at Seton Hall. He was happy for the first year, keeping busy with the strenuous yet fulfilling workload. Then he came upon the works of Baruch Spinoza. He enjoyed Spinoza’s metaphysics and arguments for determinism, but he found Spinoza’s character to be most intriguing. Durant drew upon Spinoza’s story and found poignant similarities between themselves. The absurdity of transforming the Catholic Church into a socialist constituent was then obvious to him. To his parent’s dismay, he quit seminary.

Durant moved to New York to find a job. He could now focus on secular literature, which he greatly esteemed. He continued a meager lifestyle as a lecturer while studying philosophy and history. He lectured at many progressive meetings on such topics as, “The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer,” and “The Origins of Religion.” When the Catholic Church heard about the content of the latter lecture, they issued Durant an “episcopal excommunication” on grounds that he had “proclaimed sex worship to be the chief origin of religion.”[4]

A friend found Durant a stable job working for the Francisco Ferrer Association as a teacher at their libertarian school in New York. The school was a progressive one, sponsored and run by socialists, atheists, and anarchists.[5] One of his many unruly but “delightful” students was a young girl by the name of Ariel Kaufman, daughter of Ukrainian immigrants.[6] Ariel became infatuated with her teacher, and Durant was quite enamored by her interest in him. A spark of affection developed to a passionate and unscrupulous romance, for he was twenty-eight and she was but fifteen. Will and Ariel married soon after, despite the awkward gap in ages.

In 1913, Durant entered Columbia University to receive his Ph.D. in Philosophy. He had the pleasure and good fortune to study at the feet of such giants as John Dewey, Frederick Woodbridge, William P. Montague, Robert Sessions Woodworth, Charles Beard, and Felix Adler – all of whom influenced his future aspirations.

To sustain his education and marriage, Durant began to lecture at New York’s Labor Temple. For fourteen years he lectured twice a week on a spectrum of topics including philosophy, history, music, and religion. “I was learning myself, all the time,” Durant admitted in a later interview, “I just had to keep a jump ahead of my audiences. It was during those years that I formed this amateurish outlook on history, and learned what interested people.”[7]

Because of his studies at Columbia University and his steadily rising income, Durant lost his fervent socialist radicalism. The biology and psychology classes he took forced him “to recognize the social and political implications of the inescapable, omnipresent struggle for existence.” [8] He acknowledged that “competition is the law of life,” thus the socialist desire for a warless and classless society was a biological impossibility.[9] He reasoned that the socialist movement would have to accept an inequality of power and possessions to survive its biological implications. He envisioned a cycle: “The natural concentration of wealth could be checked, now and then, by remedial legislation or disruptive revolution, but after every interruption it would soon be renewed.” Durant’s socialism was renewed, however modestly.[10]

As a prerequisite for his Doctorate in Philosophy, Durant wrote his first book Philosophy and the Social Problem (1917).[11] The book reflected his socialistic outlook and further examined what he called the “social problem.” Moreover, the book brought to light his views on the condition of American philosophy: “Philosophy was ailing, and had forfeited public influence, because it had lost itself in the esoteric abstractions of logic and epistemology, and had turned, fainthearted, away from those problems of origin and destiny, nature and civilization, morality and government, religion and death.”[12]

The problems of philosophy, in Durant’s view, were long standing. From the ongoing proliferation of the sciences in the nineteenth century and the rearguard position of epistemology came two distinct dilemmas: the segregation of literature from the public, and the need for a pragmatic approach to speculative thinking. It was in Durant’s interest to alleviate these problems. After he received his Ph.D., Durant was appointed as an instructor at Columbia teaching the “history and problems of philosophy.”[13]

PRAGMATISM AND POPULARIZATION

Indeed, even before Durant’s birth, the new physical and biological sciences along with psychology were antiquating philosophy. In turn, philosophy all but lost its credibility in the scholarly community. The “old” schools of philosophy, including metaphysics and theology, were incompatible to the prevailing scientific direction of knowledge. Traditional philosophy was in a crisis; in due course, professionals sought to regain its credibility.[14]

Philosophers increasingly specialized within the profession, publishing papers for other scholars in the rapidly expanding number of journals or presenting papers at scholarly conferences. In distancing itself from a public role, philosophy attempted to validate its professional credentials, develop its own special problems, and standardize and scientize its language and methodology for the solution of a new set of concerns.[15]

Philosophy was no more the expansive and valued prize of the public; it was instead the jealous possession of the professional. Epistemology – the origins and limitations of knowledge – seemed to fit best within this smaller scale of philosophy. Unfortunately, epistemology compounded the problem of philosophical exclusion. Focusing on the hardened logic and technical language of epistemology, professionals confined philosophy to their own circles. The growing alienation of the public appalled many people. Philosophy, they said, “must move away from technical and unresolvable epistemological problems.”[16]

From the discord arose pragmatism, or better, “middle-ground” pragmatism. Pragmatism was defined as a philosophical method of relating to science as truth but acknowledging that truth was open to revision because of the continuity of knowledge. Led by the American philosopher and educator John Dewey, “middle-ground” pragmatism wanted to popularize philosophical knowledge as much as it disputed the validity of hard-nosed epistemology.[17] Dewey conceived a strategy: “Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.”[18] Several authors, including Durant, adhered to the pragmatic view, writing in a style indicative of the educated public, and all but ignoring epistemology.

By the end of World War I, pragmatism and popularization began to influence the literary landscape. The conditions for such a change arose from the diminishing world-view of the nation. “Confronted with mass culture, immense social and economic change, and challenges to traditional American identity mounted by growing immigration, many middle-class readers became a willing audience and clientele for books to enhance the mind and soul.”[19] However, the majority of available sources, especially philosophical and historical, were targeted to a smaller scholarly audience, with little regard for the middle-class.

Durant and other popularizers, called “merchants of light” by an American historian, wrote “outlines” to ease the burden of the middle-class.[20] “Outlines”, in this case, were books or essays limited in scope and terminology, written specifically for the educated public. The “merchants of light” sought to “separate the wheat from the chaff of literature, to condense the maddening crescendo of change into useful outlines, and to moderate between genteel and modernistic visions of culture.”[21] This facilitation of difficult and elusive subjects provided “succor for the uneasy, unsure, and anxious middle-class modern.”[22] A period of popularization was born.

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Will Durant’s second book, The Story of Philosophy (1926), was distinguished as being among the first “outlines” of the period of popularization. He intentionally composed it as an incomplete “story” of philosophers and philosophical ideas. Instead of creating a comprehensive and esoteric treatise on philosophy, which would repel the average reader, he compiled a simpler and more practical “outline” of philosophy from a collection of essays he had written earlier. A complete history of philosophy was too ambitious for his own purposes. Hence Durant wrote that his use of the word Story in the title promised “an effort to present the ideas of the philosophers in non-technical terms, and to bring those ideas within the grasp and usage of the educated community in general, rather than leave them the jealous possession of a closed and esoteric minority.”[23] In this way, Durant was called a popularizer of philosophy.

Many people found The Story of Philosophy praiseworthy, but some professional philosophers accused Durant of scanting on important details and embellishing upon the trivial. In a review for The Philosophical Review, A.A. Roback wrote that The Story of Philosophy was a defective attempt to write the history of philosophy: “Twenty-five hundred years of thought cannot be popularized in such small compass… and the danger is that the majority of readers will think that they have now transversed the vast field of speculative thought since antiquity.”[24]

While Durant knew this was a concern, he had confidence in the public to delve deeper into the immense realm of speculative thinking. “I trust that the book never misled its readers into supposing that by reading it they would become philosophers overnight, or that they would be saved the trouble, or pleasure, of reading the philosophers themselves.”[25] In fact, the circulation of philosophical classics in libraries rose several hundred percent following the release of The Story of Philosophy. “Footnotes in the book directed the reader to the philosophers themselves, and specified the most significant and enduring sections of their works.”[26] It was apparent that the public was using the book as a reference source, not merely a textbook.

Some scholars, including Roback, Mortimer Adler, and Morris Cohen, found inexcusable Durant’s omission of scholastic philosophy, Chinese and Hindu philosophy, and epistemology.[27] To them, this careless exclusion undermined the integrity of their profession: “The philosophers are, so to speak, the bricks or the stones of a great edifice. We must have the cementing of the material in order to get a definite view of the structure.”[28] Durant does not excuse himself from omitting scholastic or eastern philosophy, but he gives no apology for the lack of epistemology: “[I believe] that epistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; [I hope] for the time when… philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself.”[29] Truly, Durant was a pragmatist.

Durant’s intent was to write an uncomplicated book to give the educated public access to the extensive subject of philosophy. He had no pretence in scholarship, even clarifying in the forward of the 1926 original edition: “This book is not a complete history of philosophy. It is an attempt to humanize knowledge by centering the story of speculative thought around certain dominant personalities. Certain lesser figures have been omitted in order that those selected might have the space required to make them live.”[30]

The Story of Philosophy did indeed concern the history of philosophy, however incomplete. Even Roback hesitantly bowed to Durant’s purposes: “There is no doubt that Dr. Durant has written an exceedingly stimulating book. It will help to awaken an interest in philosophy on the part of the layman and will be of value to the young student.”[31] Although Roback saw Durant’s “stories” as being insufficient and somewhat irresponsible, he admitted that his reasons for writing them were noble and insightful.

Some of Durant’s supporters said that his reputation as a simple popularizer of philosophy was inadequate. To them, his full position as a historical scholar should not have been limited to one of popularization, but to his greater achievement as an intermediary between his readers and the philosophers of the past. John Dewey said of The Story of Philosophy:

While the book is one of popularization, it is also much more than that as popularization is usually conceived… He has selected the thinkers who are expounded with good judgement… his personal comments are always intelligent and useful. He has shown remarkable skill in selecting quotations that are typical, that give the flavor of the author, and that are readable. In fine he has humanized rather than merely popularized the story of philosophy.[32]

The term “humanization” can be confused with the crux of “the new history” that was popular during the time. James Harvey Robinson, the architect of “the new history,” intended “humanization” to mean the synthesis of historical and scientific discoveries into “terms relevant to current social needs.” [33] Durant, on the other hand, saw “humanization” as the incorporation of “human interest” into his writings – a concept that would greatly influence his later Story literature.[34]

INTER-STORY

The Story of Philosophy was a best seller, selling more than 200,000 copies in the first year.[35] Durant continued to lecture at Labor Temple and traveled extensively on lecture tours. In the subsequent years, he wrote Transition (1927), an autobiographical novel detailing his young but eventful life.[36] He also composed a third book concerning philosophy – The Mansions of Philosophy (1929), later named The Pleasures of Philosophy (1952).

The Mansions of Philosophy was a hodgepodge compilation of Durant’s earlier debates and magazine articles, joined by chapters written under the rush of his lecture tours. Under the hastened circumstances, Durant admitted that he was unable to expound upon the “humanization” aspect that The Story of Philosophy so adequately portrayed.[37] Nevertheless, The Mansions of Philosophy, in a sense, picked up where The Story of Philosophy left off. As an invitation to the reader, Durant writes: “This book is an attempt at a consistent philosophy of life. It tries to do for the problems of philosophy what The Story of Philosophy sought to do for the personalities and systems of the major philosophers – to make them intelligible by transparent speech, and to vitalize them by contemporary application.”[38]

Durant’s ongoing commitment to the middle-class was obvious, yet his attitude toward philosophy was changing (indeed, even in the midst of composing The Story of Philosophy). In addition to “social reconstruction” and “middle-ground” pragmatism, Durant focused on philosophical idealism – that is, the “absorption of disparate phenomena into a theory of an overarching mind.”[39] Durant, while he still disdained epistemology, saw philosophy as “total perspective, as mind overspreading life and forging chaos into unity,” rather than exclusively the empirical perspective that Dewey and philosopher William James proposed.[40] Durant’s philosophy became, in effect, a hybrid of the warring pragmatism and idealism philosophies. He continued to adhere to the pragmatic view of “experimental method,” though it was sometimes diverted by the idealistic concept that the philosopher “alone could organize knowledge.”[41]

His newfound idealism was evident in his outlook on education, confessing that “the more we learn, the less we know.”[42] He continued with a metaphor, recalling his days at the seminary: “Therefore we approach these problems [of education] like a priest mounting the altar to perform for the first time the mystery of the Mass. We shall not solve these problems; at best we shall merely bare to one another the secret preferences of our hearts.”[43] He was not necessarily cynical of education, but he approached it with a sense of veneration and humility.

Nonetheless, even with his idealism, Durant focused closely on his role as a “teacher.” Concerning the problems of education, Durant exposed his pragmatic side, writing that the teacher’s responsibility was to “mediate between the specialist and the nation… in order to break down the barriers between knowledge and need.”[44] Earnest in his attempts to educate the nation, Durant synthesized pragmatic problem-solving and idealistic determinism into his own practical yet “total” perspective. This perspective established the foundation for his magnum opus, The Story of Civilization.

THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION

As far back as 1917, in a paper he had written for a Columbia class, Durant envisioned a project to compose a “complete” history of civilization. True to his commitment for pragmatic problem-solving, Durant exposed an academic dilemma: “Whereas economy life, politics, religion, morals and manners, science, philosophy, literature, and art had all moved contemporaneously, and in mutual influence, in each epoch of each civilization, historians had recorded each aspect in almost complete separation from the rest.”[45] Durant was incensed that historians of his time concentrated strictly on individual topics, such as politics, war, and religion. In light of the richness of the past, he believed that historical scholarship should not have been limited to particulars, but developed integrally into a simple yet extensive medium. Durant called for the synthesis of historical writing.

In a prophetic passage in The Mansions of Philosophy, Durant exclaimed his idealistic vision: “I want to see history written as a whole, I want to see all these activities of men and women in one age woven into unity, shown up in their correlations, their interdependence, their mutual influences; I want the past presented as it was – all together!”[46] Just as he felt in 1917, it was still imperative to Durant that historical writing be written integrally, not separately (as in what he later termed “shredded history”).[47] Thus was born his idea of “composite history” – that is, a synthesis of every historical aspect of the human condition.[48]

Durant, as an amateur historian, knew that “composite history” was an ambitious undertaking even for a professional. Nevertheless, in a later interview, Durant expressed his intentions for such a formidable project:

We’re amateurs [Durant and his wife], and I think we’ve learned to speak to people. We want to make history meaningful for ordinary readers, say intelligent high school graduates. We need specialists who devote their time to research, and who work from first-hand materials, sure, but I reject the notion that only university professors can write history. There’s room for an integral view, which looks at every aspect of an age – its art, its manners and morals, its philosophy, even its architecture – and shows how they all interrelate. That’s how history works – it’s not all in separate compartments.[49]

Durant’s vision for an integral history and the monetary success of The Story of Philosophy compelled him to begin an enterprise that would take forty-six years (1929-1975) and eleven volumes to complete. He called his endeavor The Story of Civilization.

Durant began the research for his first volume in 1929, which he named Our Oriental Heritage (1935). The orient was “virgin soil” to him, but he recognized that “those civilizations formed the background and basis of… Greek and Roman culture.”[50] Along with his family, Durant traveled abroad throughout the Near East and into the far reaches of Asia to collect first-hand accounts of the culture and history of the area.

While traveling through India, Durant found the political and social environment loathsome and thus composed a side-project to Our Oriental Heritage, titled The Case for India (1930).[51] Revealing his socialistic disposition, he exposed the exploitative conditions that the British government and the Hindu moneylenders imposed on the peasants of India.[52] He wrote The Case for India under the premise that “India deserved at least the same home rule that Canada then enjoyed.”[53] With the very limited success of The Case for India, Durant continued his literary enterprise.

Following the successful release of his first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, Durant, in part collaboration with his wife, released ten additional volumes spanning forty years: The Life of Greece (1939), Caesar and Christ (1944), The Age of Faith (1950), The Renaissance (1953), The Reformation (1957), The Age of Reason Begins (1961), The Age of Louis XIV (1963), The Age of Voltaire (1965), Rousseau and Revolution (1967), The Age of Napoleon (1975).

Durant realized from the onset that The Story of Civilization was an Olympian and indeed impossible task. In the preface for Our Oriental Heritage, Durant wrote: “Like philosophy, such a venture [as the history of civilization] has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity.” Durant continued with precarious optimism: “But let us hope that, like philosophy, [history] will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.”[54]

Durant’s brazenness and blind ambition offended some scholars. Critics accused Durant of carelessly dabbling in historical scholarship without professional credentials or qualifications. Professor J. H. Plumb, in New York Review of Books, asserted that “historical truth… can rarely be achieved outside the professional world [of historians].”[55] In the New York Herald Tribune Book Week, Professor Peter Gay of Columbia reflected Plumb’s assumption that only professional historians could write history, in that Durant’s “ultimate failure lies in [his] status: the book documents the loneliness of the amateur historian.”[56]

Durant realized the inevitability of professional criticism, accepting that “any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for a myriad merry darts of specialist critique.”[57] As was so in the Story of Philosophy, Durant’s purpose in The Story of Civilization was not to compose a professional writing, but to popularize history by making a large amount of information accessible and comprehensible to the educated public. The chance for errors, however, greatly increased with the scope of the undertaking. Details were lost and mistakes were made; but to Durant, the errors were small setbacks for his greater vision of “composite history.”

Not all professional historians disagreed with Durant’s ambition for a “complete” history of civilization. In The American Historical Review, J. W. Swain appreciated Durant’s efforts: “It is to be hoped that [Durant] will complete his ambitious undertaking for, in spite of its many weaknesses in detail, this history of civilization is a work well worth writing.”[58] Moreover, professional sociologists found The Story of Civilization invaluable to their profession. Harry Elmer Barnes, writing for the American Sociological Review stressed the “value” of the series, writing that Durant’s “efforts to reduce the story of the human past to formulate, patterns, and broad generalizations” benefited the sociologist’s profession.[59]

During the last few volumes of The Story of Civilization, Durant composed a short compilation of thematic essays, which he titled The Lessons of History (1968). In it, Durant revealed his idealistic philosophy of history: “Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy – an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment.”[60]

Over the many years that it took to complete The Story of Civilization, Durant acquired a keen outlook of history. His venture into the ages of human antiquity solidified his belief that history was in fact an unattainable endeavor – though one that must be attempted. Furthermore, Durant’s view of progress was more pragmatic (and more discouraging) than that in his earlier works. In The Mansions of Philosophy, Durant confidently proclaimed: “Yes we shall rise”; yet he concluded in The Lessons of History that since there was “no substantial change in man’s nature during historic times, all advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends.”[61]

Yet, Durant was not altogether pessimistic of the future of civilization. To him, history itself was the escape from a static existence. In a last attempt to reveal the importance of the past, Durant illustrated his idealistic view of history:

To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death.[62]

Durant received a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for Rousseau and Revolution, and was presented the Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford in 1977 for his contributions to historical scholarship. After writing The Age of Napoleon, Durant and his wife composed A Duel Autobiography (1977), in which they shared alternate accounts recalling their long and momentous lifetimes together.

In the preface for the last volume of The Story of Civilization, Durant admitted that his story of civilization was “too long in total, too short and inadequate in every part,” and that “only the fear of that lurking Reaper” made him conclude his literary enterprise.[63] However, with Durant’s death in 1981 came his enduring legacy: “We pass [The Story of Civilization] on, not to specialist scholars, who will learn nothing from it, but our friends, wherever they are, who have been patient with us through many years, and who may find in it some moment’s illumination or brightening fantasy.”[64]

END NOTES

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[1] Will Durant and Ariel Durant, A Duel Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 194.

[2] Ibid., 32-33.

[3] Ibid., 35.

[4] Ibid., 38. Will Durant’s religious background can be found in Raymond A. Schroth, “Will Durant’s Religion: Seminary, Exile, ‘Return’,” New Jersey History 111, no. 1-2 (1993): 44-64.

[5] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 22-25.

[6] Ibid., 41.

[7] John F. Baker, “Will and Ariel Durant,” Publishers Weekly, 24 November 1975, 7.

[8] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 67, 68.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Will Durant, Philosophy and the Social Problem (New York: Macmillan, 1917).

[12] Ibid., 72.

[13] Ibid., 74.

[14] George Cotkin, “Middle Ground Pragmatists: The Popularization of Philosophy in American Culture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 2 (April 1994): 288.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., 285, 283-284.

[18] Community Rights & Responsibilities, Office of Judicial Affairs, “John Dewey,” (University of Albany: State University of New York, accessed 30 November 1999); available from http://www.albany.edu/judicial_affairs/ john_dewey.html; Internet.

[19] James Gilbert, “Midcut, Middlebrow, Middle Class,” review of The Making of Middlebrow Culture, by Joan Shelly Rubin, Reviews in American History 20, no. 4 (December, 1992): 544-545.

[20] Joan Shelly Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 209-211.

[21] Cotkin, 286.

[22] Gilbert, 544.

[23] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 102.

[24] A. A. Roback, review of The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant, The Philosophical Review 36, no. 2 (March 1927): 194.

[25] Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers, 2d ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 1961), xiii.

[26] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 103.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Roback, 195.

[29] Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, xi-xii; Ibid., forward.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Roback, 191.

[32] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 102.

[33] Rubin, 237.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 111.

[36] Will Durant, Transition: A Sentimental Story of One Mind and One Era (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1927).

[37] Ibid., 137.

[38] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929), vii.

[39] Rubin, 229, 241.

[40] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy, ix.

[41] Rubin, 230.

[42] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy, 54.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Idem, The Story of Philosophy, viii.

[45] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 138.

[46] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy, 351.

[47] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 139.

[48] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy, 348.

[49] Baker, 6.

[50] Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. 1, Our Oriental Heritage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), viii.

[51] Will Durant, The Case for India (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930)

[52] Durant and Durant, A Duel Autobiography, 147.

[53] Ibid., 152.

[54] Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, viii.

[55] J. H. Plumb, New York Review of Books; quoted in Arnold Beichman, “Is History Only for the Historians?” The Christian Science Monitor, 28 October 1965.

[56] Peter Gay, New York Herald Tribune Book Week; quoted in Beichman.

[57] Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, vii.

[58] J. W. Swain, review of Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, The American Historical Review 50, no. 3 (April 1945): 517.

[59] Harry Elmer Barnes, review of The Age of Faith, by Will Durant, American Sociological Review 16, no. 2 (April 1951): 266.

[60] Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 12.

[61] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy, 405; Idem, The Lessons of History, 95.

[62] Ibid., 102.

[63] Idem, The Story of Civilization, vol. 11, The Age of Napoleon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), vii.

[64] Ibid.