I like to think that “The Story of Philosophy” has been bought in such quantities because it is, to a very great and very charming extent, The Story of the Philosophers. Durant’s ability as a writer of biography amounts almost to genius. Nor are his accounts of the philosophers’ philosophies often other than good bits of skillful summing-up interspersed with apt quotations. My only misgivings revolve around the stories of Durant--those paragraphs of criticism and seemingly personal opinion with which he usually ends his chapters--around those and certain omissions. What have we here, the story of philosophy, or only the story of a certain bias purporting to be the story of philosophy? As was to be expected of a born biographer, Durant follows the method of using environment to explain belief. The pessimism of Schopenhauer is due to the fact that he lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Holy Alliance, when Waterloo had been fought, the Revolution was dead, and the Son of the Revolution rotting on a rock in a distant sea. “Something of [Schopenhauer’s] despair came from the pathetic distance of St. Helena.”[214] And when “Mme. Clotilde de Vaux (whose husband was spending his life in jail) took charge of Comte’s heart, his affection for her warmed and colored his intelligence.” So Comte’s later Religion of Humanity was due to the happiness of his illegitimate union, just as his earlier Positivism had been due to the marital infelicity which led him to attempt suicide in the Seine. It is the method by which Taine years ago sought to explain all English literature. Durant is an environmentalist--which, after all, is better than being a mad hereditarian. One is tempted to enquire into his own environment, his college, his religious and philosophical surroundings, and to read dates and geography between his lines. But I cannot bring myself to apply either the environment or the heredity hypothesis to the exclusion of that entity which comes from neither, that ego which learns or does not learn from its contact with that which is not itself. That Durant is not himself a philosopher, is evident--and in his favor. We really do not need another philosopher just now--of the sort we would be likely to get. He has no system of his own, no universal touch-stone, no central thesis giving unity to his several beliefs. In his mind Kant, Darwin and Bergson meet, but no more mingle than do oil and water. An emulsifying _tertium quid_ is lacking. This lack should have made him an ideal historian of other men’s theories. And it almost did. But there is another lack. The complete historian should have a complete experience. He should have been submerged in the main stream of thought, even if he has failed to sound all its dead-waters to the bottom. And if environment and the accident of birth do not offer him such experience, he should have that thirst for knowledge which leads to exploration and discovery.