and matter, substance, tragedy, and God extend, moderate, and balance the use of our intellectual capacities.
All of these criteria apply as much to books on mathematics as to books of poetry, to books on practical individual and social problems as much as to books on metaphysics and theology.
The extrinsic criteria concern the relations of the books to each other and their teaching powers in relation to students and readers. It is generally true that these books have had the greatest numbers of readers throughout European history. Plato, Euclid, the Bible, and Shakespeare are all European best-sellers; there are a few exceptions but it would be almost safe to take this criterion as a working rule for the selection of books for any list of classics, particularly if the numbers were estimated in proportion to the time the book has endured.
Although each book must tell its own independent story, it is an important fact, which we regularly exploit, that one great book talks about the others, both those that came before, and, by anticipation of doctrine, those that come after. Each book in a list of classics is introduced, supported, and criticized by all the other books in the list. It thus gains pedagogical power and critical correction from its context. Background and preparation are thus efficiently supplied by the chronological ordering of the classics, and difficult books surprise us by their intelligibility and eloquence as they come in their providential order. Thus Newton’s Principia and Maxwell's Electricity and Magnetism as gracefully submit themselves to the learning processes of the student of the liberal arts who has read Euclid, Apollonius, and Ptolemy as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Dante's Divine Comedy do for one who has read Plato and Aristotle. It is this unguessed but abundantly confirmed collaborative teaching by the masters of the liberal arts that makes it possible and imperative to bring back to each modern youth his lost heritage of classical education.
The fact is that such a collection of the great books has in it the shining thread of the great liberal tradition in the Western World. It is this thread that the elective system has lost, and the lack of which we are feeling in the uncertainties and fears of contemporary daily life. Its loss has made it necessary to construct synthetic cultures, and it is its ghost that frightens decadent liberals who would have us get along without traditions. They would have us as persons detach ourselves from the tradition without knowing what it is or has been. Like current textbooks which similarly detach themselves from tradition we would be saluting the tradition in our spiritual deaths.
science and the modern world
The tradition moves on into the modern world, and it is transforming itself in most lively and important ways. This is happening in two ways primarily, one in mathematics, another in the laboratory. St. John's College has more required mathematics than any other liberal college in the country. Together mathematics and natural science constitute more than one-half of the required work.
Three hundred years ago algebra and the arts of analytic mathematics were introduced into European thought by René Descartes. This is perhaps the greatest intellectual revolution in recorded history, paralleling the other great revolutions in religion, morals, politics and industry. No liberal, and therefore no citizen of a democratic country, can afford to be ignorant of this change and its issues. It has redefined and transformed our whole natural and cultural world. Although it is not the only focal point around which the St. John’s curriculum may be organized, it is one which we take special care to emphasize. There is scarcely an item in the course which does not bear upon it. The last two years of the course exhibit completely the changes in the liberal arts that flow from it, and these could not be appreciated without the first two years which cover the historical period from the Greeks to Descartes.
Descartes, by using and reinterpreting the knowledge of the Greeks, made modern mathematics and the laboratory possible, so that now if we would follow the classical thread into the modern world we must know the constructions of the mathematicians and find our classical loci in the instruments of the laboratory as well as in the great books.
For this purpose we have set up a four-year laboratory in mathematics and the natural sciences with four main themes woven together to catch the understandings and insights that we need. There is the theme of mathematical constructions taught and exemplified in a great variety of exercises with the
