March 2015
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William James, “The Social Value of the College-Bed” (1907)
The sifting of human creations! —nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part.… Continue reading
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Comenius, The Way of Light: “to plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth”
John Amos Comenius, The Way of Light, translated by E. T. Campagnac (The University Press of Liverpool, printed by Hodder & Stoughton (London), 1938). In Via Lucis, vestigata et vestiganda [“The Way of Light,” written in 1641 but not published until 1668], John Amos Comenius proposed to a group of scholars on its way toward becoming the… Continue reading
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Encyclopédie
Philipp Blom, Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, The Book That Changed the Course of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). A bookseller named André-François Le Breton hired an Englishman named John Mills to translate Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia from English into French in the early 1740s. It turns out that Mills’ fluency in French was rather limited… Continue reading
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Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart
Jan Amos Komensky, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, trans. Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk (New York: Paulist Press, 1998). Originally published in 1623, but again published in 1663 with additions. Comenius writes in the person of a pilgrim who has decided to survey all the walks of life before… Continue reading
Huenemanniac 