Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Introduction

The Most Important Ideas in History: Some Candidates

In 1936, a collection of papers by Sir Isaac Newton, the British physicist and natural philosopher, which had been considered to be ‘of no scientific value’ when offered to Cambridge University some fifty years earlier, came up for auction at Sotheby’s, the international salesroom, in London. The papers were bought by another Cambridge man, the distinguished economist John Maynard Keynes (later Lord Keynes). He spent several years studying the documents – mainly manuscripts and notebooks – and in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, delivered a lecture to the Royal Society Club in London in which he presented an entirely new view of ‘history’s most renowned and exalted scientist’. ‘In the eighteenth century and since,’ Keynes told the club, ‘Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.’¹

Newton is still known to us, first and foremost, as the man who conceived the modern notion of the universe, as held together by gravity. But, in the decades since Keynes spoke to the Royal Society, a second – and very different – Newton has emerged: a man who spent years involved in the shadowy world of alchemy, in the occult search for the philosopher’s stone, who studied the chronology of the Bible because he believed it would help predict the apocalypse that was to come. He was a near-mystic who was fascinated by Rosicrucianism, astrology and numerology. Newton believed that Moses was well aware of the heliocentric theory of Copernicus and his own doctrine of gravity. A generation after the appearance of his famous book Principia Mathematica, Newton was still striving to uncover the exact plan of Solomon’s Temple, which he considered ‘the best guide to the topography of heaven’.² Perhaps most surprising of all, the latest scholarship suggests that Newton’s world-changing discoveries in science might never have been made but for his researches in alchemy.³

The paradox of Newton is a useful corrective with which to begin this book. A history of ideas might be expected to show a smooth progression in mankind’s intellectual development, from primitive notions in the very beginning, when early man was still using stone tools, through the gestation of the world’s great religions, down to the unprecedented flowering of the arts in Renaissance times, the birth of modern science, the industrial revolution, the devastating insights of evolution and the technological wizardry that marks our own day, with which we are all familiar and on which so many are dependent.

But the great scientist’s career reminds us that the situation is more complex. There has been a general development, a steady progress much of the time (the idea of progress is discussed more fully in Chapter 26). But by no means all of the time. Throughout history certain countries and civilisations have glittered for a while, then for one reason or another been eclipsed. Intellectual history is very far from being a straight line – that is part of its attraction. In his book, The Great Titration (1969), the Cambridge historian of science Joseph Needham set out to answer what he thought was one of the most fascinating puzzles in history: why the Chinese civilisation, which developed paper, gunpowder, woodblock printing, porcelain and the idea of the competitive written examination for public servants, and led the world intellectually for many centuries, never developed mature science or modern business methods – capitalism – and therefore, after the Middle Ages, allowed itself to be overtaken by the West and then dropped further and further behind (his answer is discussed on pages 439–440).⁴ The same might be said about Islam. Baghdad in the ninth century led the Mediterranean world intellectually: it was here that the great classics of the ancient civilisations were translated, where the hospital was conceived, where al-jabr, or algebra, was developed, and major advances made in falsafah, philosophy. By the eleventh century, thanks to the rigours of fundamentalism, it had disappeared. Charles Freeman, in his recent book The Closing of the Western Mind, describes many instances of the way intellectual life withered in the early Middle Ages, the years of Christian fundamentalism.⁵ In the fourth century Lactantius wrote: ‘What purpose does knowledge serve – for as to knowledge of natural causes, what blessing is there for me if I should know where the Nile rises, or whatever else under the heavens the “scientists” rave about?’⁶ Epilepsy, which Hippocrates described as a natural illness as early as the fifth century BC, was, in the Middle Ages, placed under the care of St Christopher. John of Gaddesden, an English physician, recommended as a cure the reading of the Gospel over the epileptic while simultaneously placing on him the hair of a white dog.⁷

This is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from a history of ideas: that intellectual life – arguably the most important, satisfying and characteristic dimension to our existence – is a fragile thing, easily destroyed or wasted. In the last chapter some conclusions will be attempted, in an effort to assess what has and has not been achieved in this realm. This Introduction, however, shows how this history differs from other histories, and in so doing helps explain what a history of ideas is. The discussion will be confined to an exploration of the various ways the material for an intellectual history may be organised. A history of ideas clearly touches on a vast amount of material and ways must be found to make this array manageable.

For some reason, numerous figures in the past have viewed intellectual history as a tripartite system – organised around three grand ideas, ages or principles. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) argued – heretically – that there have been three epochs, presided over by God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit respectively, during which the Old Testament, the New Testament and a ‘spiritual eternal Gospel’ will be in force.⁸ Jean Bodin (c. 1530–1596), the French political philosopher, divided history into three periods – the history of Oriental peoples, the history of Mediterranean peoples, and the history of northern peoples.⁹ In 1620 Francis Bacon identified three discoveries that set his age apart from ancient times.¹⁰ ‘It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world, the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.’¹¹ The origins of each of these discoveries have been identified since Bacon’s time but that does not change the force of his arguments.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Bacon’s amanuensis, argued that three branches of knowledge outweighed all others in explanatory power: physics, which studies natural objects; psychology, which studies man as an individual; and politics, which deals with artificial and social groupings of mankind. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) distinguished the age of the gods, the heroic age and the human age (though he borrowed some of these ideas from Herodotus and Varro). In fact, Vico tended to think in threes: he distinguished three ‘instincts’ which, he said, shaped history, and three ‘punishments’ that shaped civilisation.¹² The three instincts were a belief in Providence, the recognition of parenthood, and the instinct to bury the dead, which gave mankind the institutions of religion, family and sepulture.¹³ The three punishments were shame, curiosity and the need to work.¹⁴ The French statesman Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) argued that civilisation is the product of geographical, biological and psychological factors (Saint-Simon agreed). Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who thought that the French Revolution was the dividing line between the past and a ‘glorious future’, believed there were three outstanding issues in history – the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within one and the same nation, and the perfecting of mankind. William Godwin (1756–1836), the English anarchist, thought that the three chief ideas that would produce the all-important goal in life – the triumph of reason and truth – were literature, education and (political) justice. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) noted ‘the three greatest elements of modern civilisation [are] gunpowder, printing and the Protestant religion’, while Auguste Comte (1798–1857) idealised three stages of history – theological, metaphysical and scientific, later expanded to theological-military, metaphysical-legalistic, and scientific-industrial.¹⁵ Later still in the nineteenth century the anthropologist Sir James Frazer distinguished the ages of magic, religion and science, while Lewis Morgan, in his Ancient Society, divided history into the stages of savagery, barbarism and civilisation, and thought that the main organising ideas of civilisation were the growth of government, the growth of ideas about the family, and the growth of ideas about property.

Not everyone has fallen into this tripartite way of looking at history. Condorcet thought there had been ten stages of progress, Johann Gottfried Herder divided history into five periods, Georg Wilhelm Hegel divided it into four, and Immanuel Kant believed that progress had gone through nine stages.

Nevertheless, W. A. Dunlap, writing in 1905, used the word ‘triposis’ to describe this tendency to divide intellectual history into three, while Ernest Gellner in 1988 favoured the term ‘trinitarian’.¹⁶ In recent years we have had J. H. Denison’s Emotions as the Basis of Civilisation (1932), which divided societies into the patriarchal, the fratriarchal and the democratic. In 1937, in his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, Harry Elmer Barnes described three great changes in ‘sensibility’ in history – the arrival of ‘ethical monotheism’ in the Axial Age (700–400 BC), the advent of individualism in the Renaissance, when the present world became an end in itself instead of a preparation for the shadowy afterlife, and the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century.¹⁷

Economists have often thought in threes. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith (1723–1790) offered a pioneering analysis of the fundamental division of income into rents, wages and the profits of stock, identifying their respective owners as the landlord, the wage-earner and the capitalist, the ‘three great, original and constituent orders of every civilised society’.¹⁸ Even Marxism can be reduced to three: an age when man knows neither surplus nor exploitation, when both surplus and exploitation are pervasive, and when surplus remains but exploitation is ended.¹⁹ And Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation (1944), distinguished three great economic epochs – reciprocity, redistribution and the market. Two years later, in The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood described ‘three great crises’ that have occurred in the history of European historiography. The first occurred in the fifth century BC, when the idea of history as a science came into being; the second took place in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, with the advent of Christianity, which viewed history as the working out of God’s purpose, not man’s; and the third came in the eighteenth century with a general denial of innate ideas and intuitionism or revelation. In 1951, in Ideas and Men, Crane Brinton, professor of ancient and modern history at Harvard, identified humanism, Protestantism and rationalism as the three great ideas making the modern world. Carlo Cipolla published Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700 in 1965, in which he argued that nationalism, guns and navigation accounted for the European conquests which created the modern world. The rising nationalism in Europe, as a result of the Reformation, led to a new round of war, which promoted the growth of metallurgy, and ever more efficient – and brutal – weapons. These far outstripped anything available in the East (in contrast to the situation in 1453, when the Turks sacked Constantinople), while the developments in navigation, fuelled by ambitions of empire, enabled European ships to reach both the far east (the ‘Vasco da Gama’ era) and, eventually, the Americas.²⁰

In Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword and Book (1988), he argued that there have been three great phases in history – hunting/gathering, agrarian production and industrial production – and that these fitted with the three great classes of human activity – production, coercion and cognition. In 1991, Richard Tarnas, in The Passion of the Western Mind, argued that philosophy, in the West at any rate, can be divided into three great epochs – as largely autonomous during the classical period, as subordinate to religion during the dominant years of Christianity, and as subordinate to science ever since.²¹

In his book Fire and Civilisation (1992), Johan Goudsblom argued that man’s control of fire produced the first transformation in human life. Early man was now no longer a predator: control of fire enabled him to corral animals and to clear land. Without this, agriculture – the second transformation – would not have been possible. Control over fire also introduced the possibility of cooking, which distinguished man from the animals and may be regarded as the origins of science. (The use of smoke may also have been the first form of communication.) Control over fire, of course, also led to baking, ceramics and smelting (the ‘pyrotechnic cultures’), which enabled metal daggers and then swords to be constructed. But the third great transformation, and the most important, after agriculture, Goudsblom said, was industrialisation, the union of fire with water, to produce in the first instance steam, harnessing a new form of energy which enabled machines of unprecedented size and power to perform certain routine skills much better and much faster than was possible by hand.²²

Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford political philosopher, thought there had been three great political/psychological turning-points in history. The first came after the death of Aristotle, when the philosophical schools of Athens ‘ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life, ceased to discuss the questions connected with public and political life that had preoccupied the Academy and the Lyceum, as if these questions were no longer central . . . and suddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner experience and individual salvation’.²³ A second turning-point was inaugurated by Machiavelli, which involved the recognition that there is a division ‘between the natural and the moral virtues, the assumption that political values are not merely different from, but may in principle be incompatible with, Christian ethics’. The third turning-point – which Berlin says is the greatest yet – was the advent of romanticism. These changes are discussed in Chapter 30.

Finally, in 1997, in Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond picked up where Cipolla left off: his concern was to explain the way the world developed before modern times and why Europe discovered (and conquered) America rather than vice versa. His answer had three broad themes. Eurasia, he pointed out, is mainly an east–west landmass, whereas the Americas are north–south. The exigencies of geography, he said, mean that the migration of domesticated animals and plants is by definition easier along latitudes than it is along longitudes, which meant that cultural evolution was likewise easier, and therefore faster, in Eurasia than it was in the Americas. Second, Eurasia had more mammals capable of domestication than in the Americas (fifteen, as opposed to two), and this also helped civilisations evolve. In particular, the domestication of the horse, in Eurasia, transformed warfare, which encouraged the development of the sword, which helped the evolution of metallurgy, meaning that European weapons far outstripped their equivalents in the New World. Third, domestication of many animals meant that European humans evolved immunity to the diseases which those animals carried and which, when they were introduced into the New World, devastated the population.²⁴

It is encouraging that there is a measure of overlap here. Agriculture, weapons, science, industrialisation, and printing, for example, are each selected by more than one author. These arguments and ideas certainly help us begin to find our way about a massive field but, as will become clear later in this Introduction, and then throughout the book, though I think that all these ideas and innovations are important, my own candidates are very different.

Of course, this is by no means the only way of looking at the development of ideas – by identifying the most influential innovations and abstractions of all time. In their book, The Western Intellectual Tradition, Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish identify three ‘realms’ of intellectual activity, an approach that I have found very useful. There is first the realm of truth: the effort to inquire into truth is the concern of religion, science and philosophy, where, in an ideal world, agreement would be total and involuntary – i.e., inevitable in a logical, mathematical or syllogistical sense. Next, there is the search for what is right: this is the concern of law, ethics and politics, where agreement, largely voluntary, need not be total but in order to work still needs to be widespread. And thirdly there is the realm of taste, which is largely the business of the arts, where agreement is not necessary at all and where disagreement may be fruitful. Of course, there is again a measure of overlap between these realms (artists search for the truth, or say that they do, religion is concerned with what is right as well as with what is true) but the distinction is worth bearing in mind throughout this book. The Greeks early on recognised an important distinction between natural law and human law.²⁵

Of course, there is nothing sacred or inevitable about ‘the rule of three’. An alternative approach has been to stress the continuity of ‘big’ thoughts. Many books, for instance, have been written on such overwhelming topics as ‘Progress’, ‘Nature’, ‘Civilisation’, ‘Individualism’, ‘Power’, what is and what is not ‘Modern’. A number of scholars – political historians and moral philosophers in particular – have seen the most important intellectual strand running through the past as a moral saga revolving around the twin issues of freedom and individuality. Immanuel Kant was just one who viewed history as the narrative of man’s moral progress. Isaiah Berlin also devoted his energies to defining and refining different concepts of freedom, to explaining the way freedom has been conceived under different political and intellectual regimes, and at different times in history. The study of individualism has grown immensely in recent years, with many historians seeing it as a defining aspect of modernity and capitalism. Daniel Dennett, in his recent title Freedom Evolves, described the growth of individualism throughout history and the various ways that freedom has increased and benefited mankind. Freedom is both an idea in itself and a psychological/political condition especially favourable to the instigation of ideas.

Each of these approaches to intellectual history has something to be said for it and each of the books and essays referred to above is warmly recommended. In the event, however, I have given this book a tripartite structure, in the manner of Francis Bacon, Thomas Carlyle, Giambattista Vico, Carlo Cipolla, Ernest Gellner, Jared Diamond and others. Not merely to ape them (though one could do worse than follow this array of distinguished minds) but because the three particular ideas I have settled on, as the most important, do, I believe, concisely summarise my argument about what has happened in history and describe where we are today.

All of the forms of organisation mentioned above are recognisable in the following pages, but the three ideas I have settled on as the most important, and which determine the book’s ultimate structure and thesis, are these: the soul, Europe, and the experiment. I do not intend to rehearse the argument of the book in this Introduction but, if I may anticipate some criticisms, I trust it will become clear why I think the soul is a more important concept than the idea of God, why Europe is as much an idea as it is a place on the map, and why the humble experiment has had such profound consequences. I also think that these three ideas are responsible for our present predicament – but that too will emerge in the following pages.

I should perhaps expand a little on what I mean by ‘idea’. I do not have any magic formula according to which ideas have been chosen for inclusion in this book. I include abstract ideas and I include inventions which I think are or were important. According to some palaeontologists man’s first abstract idea occurred around 700,000 years ago, when stone hand-axes became standardised to the same proportions. This, the scientists say, shows that early man had an ‘idea’ inside his head of what a hand-axe should be. I report this debate and discuss its implications on pages 35–37. But I also treat the invention of the first hand-axes – 2.5 million years ago, before they became standardised – as evidence for an ‘idea’, after early man realised that a sharp stone would break through animal hide when his own fingernails or teeth wouldn’t. Writing is an idea, a very important idea, which was invented before 3000 BC. Today, however, we tend not to regard letters or words as inventions, as we do computers or mobile phones, because they have been so long with us. But inventions are evidence of ideas. I have treated language as an idea, because language reflects the way that people think, and the ways in which languages differ characterise the social and intellectual history of different populations. In addition, most ideas are conceived in language. Thus I consider the history and structure of the world’s most intellectually influential languages: Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, French and English.

The first person to conceive of intellectual history was, perhaps, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). He certainly argued that the most interesting form of history is the history of ideas, that without taking into account the dominating ideas of any age, ‘history is blind’.²⁶ Voltaire (1694–1778) spoke of the philosophy of history, by which he meant that history was to be looked at as what interests a philosophe (rather than a soldier-politician, say). He argued that culture and civilisation, and progress on that score, were susceptible of secular, critical and empirical enquiry.²⁷ The French Annales school, with its interest in mentalités, some of the less tangible aspects of history – for example, the everyday intellectual climate at various points in the past (how time was understood, or what, say, medieval notions of privacy were) – also comprised a form of the history of ideas, though it was hardly systematic.

But in modern times, the person who did more than anyone else to create an interest in the history of ideas was Arthur O. Lovejoy, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore in the United States. He was one of the founders of the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins and gave a series of lectures, the William James Lectures on Philosophy and Psychology, at Harvard University, in spring 1933. The topic of the series was what Professor Lovejoy called the most ‘potent and persistent presupposition’ in Western thought. This was ‘The Great Chain of Being’, published as a book of that title in 1936 and which, by 2001, had been reprinted twenty-one times. The Great Chain of Being, Lovejoy said, was for 2,400 years the most influential way of understanding the universe and implied a certain conception of the nature of God. Without acquaintance with this idea, he insisted, ‘no understanding of the movement of thought in [the West] . . . is possible.’²⁸ At its most simple, the notion underlying The Great Chain of Being, as identified in the first instance by Plato, is that the universe is essentially a rational place, in which all organisms are linked in a great chain, not on one scale of low to high (for Plato could see that even ‘lowly’ creatures were perfectly ‘adapted’, as we would say, to their niches in the scheme of things) but that there was in general terms a hierarchy which ranged from nothingness through the inanimate world, into the realm of plants, on up through animals and then humans, and above that through angels and other ‘immaterial and intellectual’ entities, reaching at the top a superior or supreme being, a terminus or Absolute.²⁹ Besides implying a rational universe, Lovejoy said, the chain also implied an ‘otherworldliness’ of certain phenomena, not just the Absolute (or God) but, in particular, ‘supersensible’ and ‘permanent entities’, namely ‘ideas’ and ‘souls’.

The chain further implied that the higher up the hierarchy one went the greater the ‘perfection’ of these entities. This was the notion of ‘becoming’, improving, approaching perfection, and from this arose the idea of the ‘good’, what it is to be good, and the identification of the Absolute, God, with the good. ‘The bliss which God unchangingly enjoys in his never-ending self-contemplation is the Good after which all other things yearn and, in their various measures and manners, strive.’³⁰ The conception of the eternal world of ideas also gave rise to two further questions: why is there any world of becoming in addition to the eternal world of ideas or, indeed, the one Supreme Being – why, in effect, is there something rather than nothing? And second, what principle determines the number of kinds of beings that make up the sensible and temporal world? Why is there plenitude? Is that evidence of the underlying goodness of God?

Lovejoy went on to trace the vicissitudes of this idea, in particular in the medieval world, the Renaissance and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He showed, for instance that Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium, which introduced the idea that the earth went round the sun, rather than vice versa, was understood by many of the time as a new way to contemplate the heavens as ‘the highest good’, as closer to what God intended mankind’s understanding to be.³¹ For example, Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church’s resistance to Copernicus, also said: ‘God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatures, and because no single created thing could fitly represent the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied creatures, and bestowed on each a certain degree of goodness and perfection, that from these we might form some idea of the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who, in one most simple and perfect essence, contains infinite perfections.’³² On this reading, Copernicus’ breakthrough was an infinitesimal increase in man’s ascent to God.

Rousseau, in Émile, said: ‘O Man! Confine thine existence within thyself, and thou wilt no longer be miserable. Remain in the place which Nature has assigned to Thee in the chain of beings . . .’³³ For Pope: ‘Know thy own point; this kind, this due degree, / Of Blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.’³⁴ The writers of the Encyclopédie, in France in the eighteenth century, thought this approach would advance knowledge: ‘Since “everything in nature is linked together”, since “beings are connected with one another by a chain of which we perceive some parts as continuous, though in the greater number of points the continuity escapes us”, the “art of the philosopher consists in adding new links to the separated parts, in order to reduce the distance between them as much as possible”.’³⁵ Even Kant spoke of ‘the famous law of the continuous scale of created beings . . .’³⁶

Influential though it was, Lovejoy felt that the idea of the great chain had failed. In fact, he said, it had to fail: it implied a static universe. But that had little to do with its influence.¹

Lovejoy was by all accounts an impressive man. He read English, German, French, Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish and his students joked that on his sabbatical year from Johns Hopkins he occupied himself by ‘reading the few books in the British Museum Library that he had not yet read’.³⁸ Nonetheless, he was criticised for treating ideas as ‘units’ – underlying and unchanging entities, like the elements in chemistry – whereas his critics saw them as far more fluid.³⁹

But Lovejoy certainly started the ball rolling in that he became the first editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, founded in 1940. (Among the contributors to that volume were Bertrand Russell and Paul O. Kristeller.) In the first issue, Lovejoy set out the Journal’s aims as: to explore the influence of classical ideas on modern thought, the influence of European ideas on American thought, the influence of science on ‘standards of taste and morality and educational theories and models’ and the influence of certain ‘pervasive and widely ramifying ideas or doctrines’, such as evolution, progress, primitivism, determinism, individualism, collectivism, nationalism and racism. He argued that the history of thought is not ‘an exclusively logical progress in which objective truth progressively unfolds itself in a rational order’. Instead, he said, it revealed a sort of ‘oscillation’ between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, between romanticism and enlightenment, arising from non-rational factors. This, he thought, was an alternative model to ‘progress’. In an essay elsewhere, he identified the subject matter of a history of ideas as: the history of philosophy, of science, of religion and theology, of the arts, of education, of sociology, of language, of folklore and ethnography, of economics and politics, of literature, of societies.

In the years since then, the Journal of the History of Ideas has continued to explore the subtle ways in which one idea in history leads to another. Here are some recent articles: Plato’s effects on Calvin, Nietzsche’s admiration for Socrates, Buddhism and nineteenth-century German thought, a pre-Freudian psychologist of the unconscious (Israel Salanter, 1810–1883), the link between Newton and Adam Smith, between Emerson and Hinduism, Bayle’s anticipation of Karl Popper, the parallels between late antiquity and Renaissance Florence. Perhaps the most substantial spin-off of the Journal was the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, published in 1973 and edited by Philip P. Wiener, who had followed Lovejoy as editor-in-chief. This massive work, in four volumes, of 2,600 pages, had 254 contributors, seven associate editors, including Isaiah Berlin and Ernest Nagel, and seven contributing editors, among whom were E. H. Gombrich, Paul O. Kristeller, Peter B. Medawar and Meyer Schapiro.⁴⁰ The dictionary identified nine core areas – these were: ideas about the external order of nature; ideas about human nature; literature and aesthetics; ideas about history; economic, legal and political ideas and institutions; religion and philosophy; formal logical mathematical and linguistic ideas. As one reviewer remarked, ‘it is a vast intellectual Golconda’.

In an essay in the Journal, to mark fifty years of publication, one contributor singled out three failures worthy of note. One was the failure of historians to come up with any understanding of what one big modern idea really means – this was ‘secularisation’; another was the widespread disappointment felt about ‘psychohistory’ when so many figures – Erasmus, Luther, Rousseau, Newton, Descartes, Vico, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche – cry out for a deep psychological understanding; and the third was the failure among both historians and scientists to get to grips with ‘imagination’ as a dimension in life generally and in particular so far as the production of ideas is concerned. These alleged failures are something worth bearing in mind as this history proceeds.⁴¹

In the pages of the Journal of the History of Ideas a distinction is often made between ‘the history of ideas’ (an English language, and mainly American, usage), and several German terms – Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts), Geistesgeschichte (history of the human spirit), Ideengeschichte (history of ideas), Wörtegeschichte (history of individual words) and Verzeitlichung (the anachronistic disposition to insert modern concepts into historical processes). These are useful terms for scholars, for refining the subject. The general reader, however, needs only to be aware that this deeper level of analysis is there, should they wish to take their interest further.

In this Introduction, by discussing the theories and arguments of others, I have tried to give a flavour of what a history of ideas is and can be. But perhaps another, altogether simpler way of looking at this book is as an alternative to more conventional history – as history with the kings and emperors and dynasties and generals left out, with the military campaigns, the empire-building conquests and the peace treaties and truces omitted. There is no shortage of such histories and I assume here that readers will know the bare bones of historical chronology. But although I do not explore particular military campaigns, or the deeds of this or that king or emperor, I do discuss advances in military tactics, the invention of new and influential weapons, theories of kingship and the intellectual battles between kings and popes for the minds of men. I do not discuss in any detail the actual conquest of America but I do dwell on the thinking that led to the discovery of the New World and the ways in which that discovery changed how Europeans and Muslims (for example) thought. I do not describe the build-up of empires but I do discuss the idea of empire, and of colonialism. I explore ‘The imperial mind’, how for example the British changed Indian thinking and vice versa. Ideas about race haven’t always been as contentious as they are now and that, in itself, is a matter of interest and importance.

One set of arguments I make space for is the alternative to Lovejoy’s ‘Great Chain’ thesis, as epitomised by James Thrower’s excellent, if little-known, The Alternative Tradition.⁴² This is a fascinating exploration of naturalistic views of the past, in other words ideas which seek to explain the world – its existence and order – without recourse to God or the gods. In my view this tradition has not had the attention it merits (and is needed now more than ever). Thrower’s book is discussed in Chapter 25.

I have introduced many ‘little’ ideas that I found fascinating but are rarely included in more conventional histories, despite being indispensable. Who had the idea to divide time into BC and AD and when? Why do we divide a circle into 360 degrees? When and where were the ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs (+ and –) introduced into mathematics? We live in an age of suicide bombers, who do what they do because they believe they will earn an honoured place in paradise – where does this strange notion, paradise, come from? Who discovered the Ice Age and how and why did it come about? My aim throughout has been to identify and discuss those ideas and inventions that have had a long-term influence on the way we live or have lived and think. I do not expect everyone to agree with my choice, but this is a long book and I urge any reader who thinks I have made serious omissions to write to me. I also urge the reader to consult the notes at the back of the book. Many aspects of the past are the subject of fascinating dispute among scholars. To have laid out these disagreements fully in the main text would have held up the narrative unreasonably, but I do make space for the more important intellectual sword-fights in the notes.