Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Further Notes

1. Here is something else to bear in mind – that to be influential an idea does not have to be right. The critic Paul Robinson made the same point about Sigmund Freud in the twentieth century: ‘The dominant intellectual presence of our century was, for the most part, wrong.’³⁷

2. There is other evidence that the art of the early Americans also falls into three separate styles.³⁹

3. Boustrophedon means the lines follow the route of a plough: if the first line is right to left, the second is left to right, the third right to left, and so on.

4. A case of ‘suttee’, a widow sacrificing herself following the death of her husband, was reported from northern India in the summer of 2002. An account of the nineteenth-century human sacrifice among the Khonds of Bengal is given in the notes.

5. The English word ‘soul’ is derived from the Germanic saiwalo.

6. See here, for the scholarly disagreements on this subject.

7. The romantic term ‘Silk Road’ was first coined in the 1870s by the German geographer Ferdinand Paul Wilhelm Freiherr von Richthofen, ancestor of the First World War flying ace, the Red Baron.

8. The empiricists in Alexandria had carried out experiments but never developed this as a systematic approach. So too with the Chinese in the Han age and al-Rhazi in ninth-century Baghdad.

9. Among the things at risk in Constantinople was the greatest relic collection of all: the Crown of Thorns, the cloth from Edessa on which Christ imprinted his face, St Luke’s portrait of the Virgin, the hair of John the Baptist.⁴⁸

10. ‘Holy John, remove the sin from our unclean lips so that we, thy servants, can give free expression to our innermost feelings and praise thy wondrous actions.’¹⁰³

11. A nautical mile, one minute of the great circle of the earth, is equal to 2,025 yards, roughly 15 per cent greater than a statute mile, 1,760 yards.

12. The principle of logarithms may be illustrated by the following simple sum: 100 (10²) × 1000 (10³) = 100,000 (10⁵). It is much easier and quicker to add the ² and the ³ to equal ⁵ than to do the whole calculation.

13. Newton himself, who was an Arian – that is, he did not believe in the divinity of Christ – thought that God was ‘immanent’ in space and time, existing everywhere, and that matter alone had been created. This was in effect a return to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation.⁷²

14. In The Book of J, David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (1990) argue that the author of J may well have been a woman of the royal house living at King Solomon’s court (although the latest Israeli scholarship throws doubt on the very existence of Solomon: see Chapter 7).⁸⁰

15. This was in itself a step leading towards the discovery of the pressure of the atmosphere.

16. John Elliott questions whether Baroque art, heavily dependent on gold and silver ornamentation, would have been possible without the riches of the New World.⁶

17. See here, for a discussion of the Indian alphabets.

18. Edward Said’s controversial views about Western attitudes to ‘the Orient’ are considered in Chapter 33, below.

19. Some of these paragraphs are an elaboration of discussion in the author’s previous book, A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind.

20. Again, these paragraphs are based, in part, on material which appeared in the author’s A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind.

21. It was called electricity after the Greek word ηλεκτρον, elektron, which means amber. In ancient Greece it had been first observed that amber, when rubbed, attracts all articles towards it.

22. They are, however, discussed fully in the present author’s A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind.

23. In a sense, the gene has developed properties of the soul in the contemporary world. I mean this in the sense that it is a hidden, indestructible substance, which to an extent governs our nature irrespective of what we consciously might wish for ourselves. A gene is not a soul, but many people seem to regard it as such.