Triumphal March

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY by Will and Ariel Durant. 117 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.

When the tenth and final volume of their massive The Story of Civilization appeared last year, Historians Will (82) and Ariel (70) Durant promised readers one last postlude volume distilling the observations and conclusions of their 40-odd years of scholarship.

In The Lessons of History, the Durants do not set themselves up as oracles. On the contrary, they are disarmingly honest in admitting that all historians operate with partial knowledge, and that any belief that they can examine a past epoch with total perspective is largely an optical illusion. "Most history is guessing," they confess, "and the rest is prejudice." Still, in their long tour through history, the Durants have reached some conclusions. A major one is that man, and not his environment, makes civilization. Over and over again, they submit, man has proved his capacity to make a culture when he is determined to, despite the most hostile natural obstacles.

The Durants admit they can find no substantial change in man's basic nature in the uncountable centuries since he first appeared out of the murk of prehistory. All technological advances actually can be written off "as new means of achieving old ends--the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other (or by the same), the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars."

Yet the Durants reject the gloomy view that man is in a dismal rut. Modern existence, precarious, chaotic and murderous as it is, is a vast improvement over the ignorance, superstition, violence and disease of earlier periods. They ask: Are we ready to scuttle the technology that has spread food, home ownership, comfort, education and lei sure beyond any precedent? Would we rather have lived under the laws of the Athenian Republic or the Roman Empire than under constitutions that give us habeas corpus, trial by jury, religious and intellectual freedom and the emancipation of women?

The heritage of modern man, in fact, is richer than ever before in history--"richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo's, for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire's, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment." Furthermore, they foresee no limits to man's long upward journey. "If progress is real despite our whining," they conclude, "it is not because we are born any healthier, better or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we were born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.