A Syntopical Index to the Great Ideas in the Harvard Classics
Veritas · syn · topos
Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts. Passages were tagged by Claude Sonnet 5.5 against Mortimer Adler's 102 Great Ideas, with Censorship, Charity, Chivalry, Diversion, Exploration, Friendship, Geology, Hospitality, Hypocrisy, Madness, Miracles, National Character, Old Age, Patriotism, Patronage, Race and Nationality, Revenge, Taxation, The Sublime added for this set; each reference links to the passage in the reader and to the scanned page.
Inventory of Terms: 2274 terms from Eliot's General Index, each leading to the topics where it is discussed
The plan is Mortimer J. Adler’s: the list of Great Ideas, the outline of topics under each, the references in chronological order, the cross-references and the Inventory of Terms all follow his Syntopicon (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Great Books of the Western World, vols. 2–3, 1952).
The texts are The Harvard Classics, edited by Charles W. Eliot (P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–1910), from the scans and OCR at the Internet Archive (item Harvard-Classics). Two parts of Eliot’s apparatus in volume 50 are built in: his General Index supplies the terms of the Inventory and served as a check on the indexing, and his Chronological Index supplies the authors’ dates by which references are ordered.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 read every passage, indexed it against the ideas, and drafted the outlines and placed the passages under their topics; Claude Opus 5.5 wrote the introductory essays from the notes on those passages. Quotations in the essays have been checked against this edition.