The Wisdom of Humankind (An Old and Rare Book)

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Putting the best expressions of human wisdom be- tween the covers a single book would be, one might think, a vitally important undertaking. Yet there have been very few attempts at it in our century-for only a dedicated intellectual and spiritual genius of Tolstoy's stature would be equal to the task, and such geniuses are scarce.

The gathering together of the wisdom of humankind was precisely the endeavor for which Tolstoy felt a pro- found need. This endeavor became the main project of the last seven years of his life (1903-1910). During most of that period, drafts of this work were on his desk, written and rewritten as he devoted most of his thought and energy to the project. The book went through four versions, and from one version to the next Tolstoy improved and re- fined both content and format. Even on his deathbed he was busy correcting page proofs of the fourth edition.

The final result-the fourth edition-was a creative synthesis, published in Russian shortly after Tolstoy's death, under the title The Way of Life (1911). Tolstoy's book is composed of direct quotations from the works of great sages, of paraphrases of similarly important observations, and of passages elucidating Tolstoy's views. All of these entries are merged with one another, and arranged in thirty-one chapters.

Tolstoy's work in gathering the essential wisdom of various cultures and ages has long been known to individual scholars, but not to the broader public. The purpose of the present edition is to fill this awareness gap and to make Tolstoy's comprehensive and insightful work accessible, in compact form, to the general reader. This new edition in English, while based on the authoritative Russian scholarly edition of 1956, is a distillation of Tolstoy's work in the kind of compact edition that the writer himself stated would be desirable. At the time of his death he was in fact planning to bring out such a shorter version of his original work.

Tolstoy's creative summation of the wisdom of the ages was not the only such volume written in this century. Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy (1944) shared some of the aims of Tolstoy's compendium. Both writers focused on ethical values and aimed at conveying morally founded wisdom. In Tolstoy's original work quotations are included from sages ranging from Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and Voltaire to Thoreau and Henry George-all of whom had spoken to the highest common factor of ethically grounded wisdom.