Despite the length of this book, critics will undoubtedly note
omissions. Confronting the writer of every textbook of history is the
eternal problem of selection--the choice of what is most pointedly
significant from the sum total of man's thoughts, words, and deeds. It
is a matter of personal judgment, and personal judgments are
notoriously variant. Certainly there will be critics who will complain
of the present author's failure to follow up his suggestions concerning
sixteenth-century art and culture with a fuller account of the
development of philosophy and literature from the seventeenth to the
twentieth century; and the only rejoinders that the harassed author can
make are the rather lame ones that a book, to be a book, must conform
to the mechanical laws of space and dimension, and that a serious
attempt on the part of the present writer to make a synthesis of social
and political facts precludes no effort on the part of other and abler
writers to synthesize all these facts with the phenomena which are
conventionally assigned to the realm of "cultural" or "intellectual"
history.
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