From the Academy

At the root of our discontents, says Mr. William T. Couch, is baneful ignorance. We moderns behave irrationally because we have not acquired right reason. How may we recover knowledge, and even wisdom? Why, from an encyclopedia—but an encyclopedia very different from any now available.

Mr. Couch, a very experienced scholarly editor, has published an important book about our general failure in learning. It is The Human Potential: An Essay on Its Cultivation (Duke University Press, $9.75). Having been the editor-in-chief of two encyclopedias, W. T. Couch knows what is wrong with the Encyclopedia Britannica, with Collier’s Encyclopedia, with the Americana. The fragmentation of knowledge, the denial of meaning, the loss of intellectual coherence—these afflictions, general in our civilization, at once are reflected in, and in part are caused by, our encyclopedias.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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At the root of our discontents, says Mr. William T. Couch, is baneful ignorance. We moderns behave irrationally because we have not acquired right reason. How may we recover knowledge, and even wisdom? Why, from an encyclopedia—but an encyclopedia very different from any now available.

Mr. Couch, a very experienced scholarly editor, has published an important book about our general failure in learning. It is The Human Potential: An Essay on Its Cultivation (Duke University Press, $9.75). Having been the editor-in-chief of two encyclopedias, W. T. Couch knows what is wrong with the Encyclopedia Britannica, with Collier’s Encyclopedia, with the Americana. The fragmentation of knowledge, the denial of meaning, the loss of intellectual coherence—these afflictions, general in our civilization, at once are reflected in, and in part are caused by, our encyclopedias.