The Practical Cogitator or the Thinker's Anthology

THE literature of humanism, accumulating for the past three thousand years, is a secular Bible, immeasurably richer than so-called Holy Writ. One explores this literature all his life; there is no end either to its resources or to the depths in it to be plumbed. Its dimensions are so vast and our lives are so accelerated by modern technology that more and more we are having recourse to anthologies.

An anthology has two ordinary functions: one is to spark our mental engine and start it turning over; the second is to send us to some of the great originals. The Practical Cogitator is capable of both these and of a third equally vital: it sets the reader’s mind off upon hunts of his own, Mr. Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and Mr. Ferris Greenslet, men of wide learning and penetrating insight, have assembled a chapter, a large and powerful chapter, in the secular literature of human wisdom. There has probably never been a time in the history of mankind when such wisdom was more needed.

LUCIEN PRICE