About 28 minutes
Extracts from "Sikes on Parochial Communion" relating to Episcopacy, and the sin of Schism — A Closer Reading
Ethics
6,375 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #62228
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Start with a reading choice
Three of the shortest recorded reading commitments in this catalog. Times are estimates, not quality ratings.
About 29 minutes
Saint Ursula: I. The Story of St. Ursula. II. The Dream of St. Ursula. — Context and Discussion
Ethics
6,601 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #30173About 34 minutes
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — Reading Companion
Metaphysics
7,750 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #45315Search the excerpts stored with this catalog
94 of 94 catalog books have a stored excerpt with a Gutenberg source record. Search covers these excerpts only, up to 6,000 characters per book. A missing match does not mean the phrase is absent from the full work.
Read a catalog excerpt example: The Book of Tea — Inside the Classic
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism--Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tende…
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Compare two books and their available excerpts
| Book | Recorded words | Estimated minutes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extracts from "Sikes on Parochial Communion" relating to Episcopacy, and the sin of Schism — A Closer Reading | 6,375 | 28 | Gutenberg #62228 |
| Saint Ursula: I. The Story of St. Ursula. II. The Dream of St. Ursula. — Context and Discussion | 6,601 | 29 | Gutenberg #30173 |
| The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — Reading Companion | 7,750 | 34 | Gutenberg #45315 |
How these choices and excerpts are prepared
Choices use stored catalog measurements. Estimates vary with reading speed. A shared category is a catalog label, not a claim that two books have the same argument or literary quality.
Search reads excerpt text stored with this catalog and links to its associated Gutenberg record. The connection is stored in the site database; this tool does not recheck that every excerpt is word-for-word identical to that external record. Excerpt search does not cover every chapter and does not verify historical publication dates.
Catalog snapshot checked: 2026-09-26. Coverage: 94 public books, 94 available source excerpts.
Do more with this book catalog
This library gathers 94 public-domain works in philosophy and ethics, spanning four categories: Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, and Political Philosophy. Each text is presented with tools that help you explore its content, structure, and reading demands before you begin.
The pages here are designed for practical use. You can compare books side by side, find titles that match your interests or reading capacity, and get honest estimates of how long a work might take to read. All facts come directly from the catalog records.
94
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
94
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Find a Book
Use the finder to filter by category, subject, length, or reading time. It helps you locate works that fit your current interests and available time.
Compare Works
See how books stack up on word count, sections, and sentence complexity. This tool is useful for choosing between similar titles.
Plan Your Reading
Get reading time estimates based on median reading speed. Know what you are getting into before you start a long philosophical text.
Choosing, Comparing, and Tracking: A Guide to the Library Tools
The QAQAE Philosophy & Ethics Library brings together 94 works that range from brief polemical pamphlets to multi-volume philosophical projects. With four categories and a median word count just under 54,000, the collection offers plenty of variety, but that variety can make it hard to know where to begin. Three tools—Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker—work together to help you move from a vague interest to a finished reading plan.
Each tool serves a distinct purpose. Book Finder narrows the catalog by the criteria you care about, Compare Books lets you weigh two or three candidates side by side, and Reading Tracker turns a chosen book into a realistic schedule. Used separately, they are useful; used together, they cover the full arc of reading a book from this library.
Start with Book Finder
Book Finder is the entry point. You can filter by category, length, estimated reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, or subject, and you can choose whether to see popular titles or hidden gems. For example, if you are interested in political philosophy but want something shorter than the median, you can set the category to Political Philosophy and choose a length like short or medium. The tool will return a list that respects your preferences without penalizing books for criteria you leave open.
One useful observation from this catalog: the four categories are not evenly sized. Ethics contains 64 titles, while Logic, Metaphysics, and Political Philosophy each contain 10. If you filter by a smaller category, the results will be more manageable, but you may need to relax other criteria to see enough options. Book Finder is designed to handle that trade-off.
Refine with Compare Books
Once Book Finder has surfaced a few possibilities, Compare Books lets you examine up to three titles side by side. The tool shows word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, and subjects. These metrics are descriptive, not evaluative—they tell you about the shape of a book, not its quality.
For instance, The Illustrated Key to the Tarot: The Veil of Divination — Context and Discussion (id 259) sits in Political Philosophy and runs about 38,790 words, while a work like Demonology and Devil-lore — Key Ideas to Explore (id 253) in Logic is far longer at 277,828 words. Comparing them directly makes the difference in commitment obvious before you start.
Plan with Reading Tracker
After you have chosen a book, Reading Tracker helps you plan your progress. It records pages read, total pages, and a daily goal. If a fixed page count is not available, it estimates one based on a standard 250 words per page. You can override that estimate with the page count from your own edition.
The tracker then calculates estimated remaining time and finish date based on your daily goal. Progress is stored in your browser, so no account is needed. This is a practical tool for pacing a long read, such as a multi-volume work from the Yoga-Vasishtha series, where knowing your daily page goal can keep you moving through hundreds of pages.