Category: Great Minds

More than one hundred years have passed since the death of one of America’s finest wits, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). His characters still live on in the national imagination. They are stark images, as rough and ready as the everyman, and they shine light on the nature of what it means to be American. …

Philosophy and science were invented in ancient Greece by people uncorrupted by the monotheism that has shaped our culture. With the exception of Plato, Greeks tended to be humanists, naturalists, and religious skeptics. Though many of their scientific theories are wrong, there is a wealth of wisdom to be gained from studying their views on …

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) did more than any other American to impress upon late – nineteenth – and twentieth-century thought the idea that science and religion are enemies locked in combat on an almost military scale. Ironically, this was precisely the opposite of his intent. Born on November 7, 1832, in Homer, New York, into …

An obscure New England farmer and teacher until his first book of verse, A Boy’s Will, was published in 1913, Robert Frost (1874–1963) died an international celebrity. He garnered four Pulitzer Prizes and was awarded forty-four honorary degrees. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and other anthology …

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was a literary prodigy. As a nineteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, he drafted the seminal novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. This gritty, unsentimental portrait of Bowery lowlifes initiated modern American fiction. It was the first native specimen of literary naturalism. Crane said of the novel: “I tried to make plain …

That no Flake of [snow] fall on you or them—is a wish that would be a Prayer, were Emily not a Pagan. —Letter to Catherine Sweetser, 1878 When Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) died, she was virtually unknown to the public. Only seven of her poems had been published, a few without permission, and they attracted little …

Thomas Paine’s story is the story of America. To understand what happened to the revolutionary experiment that began at Lexington and Concord with the 1775 “sho t heard round the world”—to understand how we ended up in the present financial morass, the legacy of the so-called unitary executive—there is no better model than Paine’s life …

One of America’s great humanists was the philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910). James served as a vital bridge between the humanism of the transcendentalists and the revival of humanism in the 1920s and 30s. His largest contribution to humanism consisted in his eagerness to champion the individual person and the personal perspective, the direct …

The following passages have been selected from the first publication of the essay “What Makes a Life Significant” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life& rsquo;s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1899), pp. 265–301.—Eds. A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly …

Though in his lifetime his poetry was seldom praised, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) is now ensconced in the pantheon of English poets. His “Ode to the West Wind,” “Ozymandias,” “To a Skylark,” “The Cloud,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” “Adonais,” and “Prometheus Unbound” are entrenched in anthologies of literature and studied throughout the world. …

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), was once the most celebrated poet in Europe. Handsome and charismatic, he was the darling of polite society, the cynosure of salons, a pacesetter in fashion and mannerism, the observed of all observers. Smitten debutantes, madams, and maidservants vied for the attention of the dashing peer of the realm. …

Long ago in the Protestant hinterlands of northeast Texas, four young infidels consecrated their bibulous souls to an eleventh-century Persian astronomer-poet. Each Satur day night, in an old Studebaker, we made a pilgrimage to Hugo, Oklahoma, the nearest wet town, to procure libations of Thunderbird wine. As we meandered homeward on isolated back roads, we …

Pierre Bayle was one of the most famous and thoroughgoing skeptics of his day. This fact is difficult to reconcile with his professed Calvinism, the sincerity of which is anybody’s guess. Some commentators maintain that it was completely genuine. Frederick the Great and Voltaire thought that it was a cover so that Bayle could live …

We can draw energy, inspiration, and strategies from the gadfly who launched the Western tradition of independent thinking 2,500 years ago. As humanists, it is natural for us to look to our fellow human beings for the values and motivation to become all we are capable of being. As we strive to make the most …