project. Benton at first refused the deal on the basis that the set of works selected would be just that, artifacts, and never actually read. By chance, Adler was re-reading a source he was using for a book he was writing at the time called How to Think about War and Peace (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169933.How_to_Think_about_War_and_Peace ). He noted to the person who had provided the book for him that, while he remembered reading this book as a source for the book he was writing, he had missed the instructive passage this person was pointing out to him and wondered why that had happened. They realized that Adler had read the book focusing on one idea about war and peace and missed the particular significance and importance of the passage about a different subject. Adler struck on the idea to accede to assume the task of producing an index for the whole set for Hutchins by means of which readers could have a sort of "random access" to the works, with the hoped-for result that they would develop a greater interest in the works themselves. Failure to come to terms After deciding what subjects and authors to include, and how to present the materials, the indexing part of the project was begun, with a budget of another $60,000. Adler began compiling what his group called the "Greek index" bearing on the works selected from ancient Greece, expecting completion of the entire project within six months. After two years, the Greek index was declared to be a resounding failure. The inferior terms under the Great Ideas across the centuries in which the Greek-language works were written had shifted in their significance, and the preliminary index reflected that, the ideas presented not having "come to terms" with each other. During those times, Adler had a flash of insight. He set his group re-reading each work preliminarily with a single assigned subordinate idea in mind in the form of a fairly elaborate phrase. If any instances of the idea appeared, they could collate them with co-ordinate ideas of a similar type collected the same way, use the material thus noted to better re-frame the larger idea structure and then finally start re-reading the work in its entirety with revised phrasing to do the complete indexing, of ideas. Eventual popular success In 1945, Adler began writing the initial forms of the essays for the Great Ideas and