The Penguin History of the World

7 Ideas Old and New

The essence of the civilization Europe was exporting to the rest of the globe lay in ideas. The limits they imposed and the possibilities they offered shaped the way in which that civilization operated, its style and the way it saw itself. What is more, although the twentieth century did great damage to them, the leading ideas adumbrated by Europeans between 1500 and 1800 still provide most of the signposts by which we make our way. European culture was then given a secular foundation; it was then, too, that there took hold a progressive notion of historical development as movement towards an apex at which Europeans felt themselves to stand. Finally it was then that there grew up a confidence that scientific knowledge used in accordance with utilitarian criteria would make possible limitless progress. In short, the civilization of the Middle Ages at last came to an end in the minds of thinking men and women.

For all that, things rarely happen cleanly and neatly in history, and few Europeans would have been aware of this change by 1800. In a couple of centuries there had been little movement in the way most of them understood and behaved. The traditional institutions of monarchy, hereditary status society and religion still held sway over millions in that year. Only a hundred years before there had been no civil marriage anywhere in Europe and there was still none over most of it. Barely twenty years before 1800 the last heretic had been burnt in Poland, and even in England an eighteenth-century monarch had, like medieval kings, touched for the King’s Evil. The seventeenth century, indeed, had in one or two respects even shown regression. In both Europe and North America there were epidemics of witch-hunting far more widespread than anything in the Middle Ages (Charlemagne had condemned witch-burners to death and canon law had forbidden belief in the night-flights and other supposed pranks of witches as pagan).

Nor was this the end of superstition. The last English wizard was harried to his death by his neighbours well after 1700 and a Protestant Swiss was legally executed by his countrymen for witchcraft in 1782. The Neapolitan cult of St Januarius was still of political importance in the era of the French Revolution because the successful or unsuccessful liquefaction of the saint’s blood was believed to indicate divine pleasure or displeasure at what the government was doing. Penology was still barbarous; some crimes were thought so atrocious as to merit punishment of exceptional ferocity, and it was as parricides that the assassin of Henry IV of France and the attempted assassin of Louis XV suffered their abominable torments. The second died under them in 1757, only a few years before the publication of the most influential advocacy of penal reform that has ever been written. The glitter of modernity in the eighteenth century can easily deceive us; in societies which produced art of exquisite refinement and outstanding examples of chivalry and honour, popular amusements focused on the pleasures of bear-baiting, cock-fighting or pulling the heads off geese.

If popular culture often shows most obviously the weight of the past, until almost the end of these three centuries much of the formal and institutional apparatus which upheld the past also remained intact over most of Europe. The most striking example to modern eyes would be the primacy still enjoyed almost everywhere in the eighteenth century by organized religion. In every country, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox alike, even ecclesiastical reformers took it for granted that religion should be upheld and protected by the law and the coercive apparatus of the state. Only a very few advanced thinkers questioned this. In much of Europe there was still no toleration for views other than those of the established Church. The coronation oath taken by a French king imposed on him the obligation to stamp out heresy, and only in 1787 did non-Catholic Frenchmen gain any recognized civic status and therefore the right to legitimize their children by contracting legal marriage. In Catholic countries censorship, though often far from effective, was still supposed (and sometimes strove) to prevent the dissemination of writings inimical to Christian belief and the authority of the Church. Although the Counter-Reformation spirit had ebbed and the Jesuits were dissolved, the Index of prohibited books and the Inquisition which had first compiled it were maintained. The universities everywhere were in clerical hands; even in England, Oxford and Cambridge were closed to nonconformist dissenters and Roman Catholics. Religion also largely determined the content of their teaching and the definition of the studies they pursued.

The institutional fabric of society, it is true, did show the onset of innovation. One of the reasons why universities lost importance in these centuries was that they no longer monopolized the intellectual life of Europe. From the middle of the seventeenth century there appeared in many countries, and often under the highest patronage, academies and learned societies such as the English Royal Society, which was given a charter in 1662, or the French Acadèmie des Sciences, founded four years later. In the eighteenth century such associations greatly multiplied; they were diffused through smaller towns and founded with more limited and special aims, such as the promotion of agriculture. A great movement of voluntary socialization was apparent; though most obvious in England and France, it left few countries in western Europe untouched.

Clubs and societies of all sorts were a characteristic of an age no longer satisfied to exhaust its potential in the social institutions of the past, and they sometimes attracted the attention of government. Some of them made no pretension to have as their sole end literary, scientific or agricultural activity, but provided gatherings and meeting-places at which general ideas were debated, discussed or merely chatted about. In this way they assisted the circulation of new ideas. Among such associations the most remarkable was the international brotherhood of freemasons. It was introduced from England to continental Europe in the 1720s and within half a century spread widely; there may have been more than a quarter of a million masons by 1789. They were later to be the object of much calumny; the myth was propagated that they had long had revolutionary and subversive aims. This was not true of the craft as a body, however true it may have been of a few individual masons, but it is easy to believe that so far as masonic lodges, like other gatherings, helped in the publicity and discussion of new ideas, they contributed to the breaking up of the ice of tradition and convention.

The increased circulation of ideas and information did not, of course, rest primarily on such meetings, but on the diffusion of the written word through print. One of the crucial transformations of Europe after 1500 was that it became more literate; some have summed it up as the change from a culture focused on the image to one focused on the word. Reading and writing (and especially the former), though not universally diffused, had, nevertheless, become widespread and in some places common. They were no longer the privileged and arcane knowledge of a small élite, nor were they any longer mysterious in being intimately and specially connected with religious rites.

In assessing this change we can emerge a little way from the realm of imponderables and enter that of measurable data, which shows that somehow, for all the large pools of illiteracy which still existed in 1800, Europe was by then a literate society as it was not in 1500. That is, of course, not a very helpful statement as it stands. There are many degrees of attainment in both reading and writing. Nevertheless, however we define our terms, Europe and its dependencies in 1800 probably contained most of the literate people in the world. It therefore had a higher proportion of literates than other cultures. This was a critical historical change. By then, Europe was well into the age of the predominance of print, which eventually superseded, for most educated people, the spoken word and images as the primary means of instruction and direction, and lasted until the twentieth century restored oral and visual supremacy by means of radio, cinema and television.

The sources for assessing literacy are not good until the middle of the nineteenth century – when, it appears, somewhere around half of all Europeans still could neither read nor write – but they all suggest that the improvement from about 1500 was cumulative but uneven. There were important differences between countries, between the same countries at different periods, between town and country, between the sexes and between occupations. All this is still true (though in diminished degree), and it greatly simplifies the problem of making general statements: none but the vaguest are possible until recent times. But specific facts are suggestive about trends.

The first signs of the educational effort underlying the increase of literacy can be seen before the invention of printing. They appear to be another part of that revival and invigoration of urban life between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose importance has already been noted. Some of the earliest evidence of the commissioning of schoolmasters and provision of school places comes from the Italian cities which were then the vanguard of European civilization. In them there soon appeared a new appreciation, that literacy is an essential qualification for certain kinds of office: we find, for example, provisions that judges should be able to read – a fact with interesting implications for the history of earlier times.

The early lead of the Italian cities had given way by the seventeenth century to that of England and the Netherlands (both countries with, for the age, a high level of urbanization). These have been thought to be the European countries with the highest levels of literacy in about 1700; the transfer of leadership to them illustrates the way in which the history of rising literacy is geographically an uneven business. Yet French was to be the international language of eighteenth-century publication and the bedrock of the public which sustained this must surely have been found in France. It would not be surprising if levels of literacy were higher in England and the United Provinces, but the numbers of the literate may well have been larger in France, where the total population was so much bigger.

An outstanding place in the overall trend to literacy must surely be given to the spread of printing. By the seventeenth century there was in existence a corpus of truly popular publishing, represented in fairy stories, tales of true and unrequited love, almanacs and books of astrology, and hagiographies. The existence of such material is evidence of demand. Printing had given a new point to being literate, too, for the consultation of manuscripts had necessarily been difficult and time-consuming because of their relative inaccessibility. Technical knowledge could now be made available in print very quickly and this meant that it was in the interest of the specialist to read in order to maintain his skill in his craft.

Another force making for literacy was the Protestant Reformation. Almost universally, the reformers themselves stressed the importance of teaching believers how to read; it is no coincidence that by the nineteenth century Germany and Scandinavia both reached higher levels of literacy than many Catholic countries. The Reformation made it important to read the Bible and it had rapidly become available in print in the vernaculars, which were thus strengthened and disciplined by the diffusion and standardization which print brought with it. Bibliolatry, for all its more obviously unfortunate manifestations, was a great force for enlightenment; it was both a stimulus to reading and a focus for intellectual activity. In England and Germany its importance in the making of a common culture can hardly be exaggerated, and in each country it produced a translation of the Bible which was a masterpiece.

As the instance of the reformers shows, authority was often in favour of greater literacy, but this was not confined to the Protestant countries. In particular, the legislators of innovating monarchies in the eighteenth century often strove to promote education – which meant in large measure primary education. Austria and Prussia were notable in this respect. Across the Atlantic the Puritan tradition had from the start imposed in the New England communities the obligation to provide schooling. In other countries education was left to the informal and unregulated operation of private enterprise and charity (as in England), or to the Church (as in France). From the sixteenth century begins the great age of particular religious orders devoted to teaching.

An important consequence, promoter and concomitant of increased literacy was the rise of the periodical press. From broadsheets and occasional printed newsletters there evolved by the eighteenth century journals of regular publication. They met various needs. Newspapers began in seventeenth-century Germany; a daily came out in London in 1702, and by the middle of the century there was an important provincial press and millions of newspapers were being printed each year. Magazines and weekly journals began to appear in England in the first half of the eighteenth century and the most important of them, the Spectator, set a model for journalism by its conscious effort to shape taste and behaviour. Here was something new. Only in the United Provinces did journalism have such success as in England; probably this was because all other European countries enjoyed censorships of varying degrees of efficacy as well as different levels of literacy. Learned and literary journals appeared in increasing numbers, but political reporting and comment were rarely available. Even in eighteenth-century France it was normal for the authors of works embodying advanced ideas to circulate them only in manuscript; in this stronghold of critical thought there was still a censorship, although one arbitrary and unpredictable and, as the century wore on, less effective in its operation.

It may have been a growing awareness of the subversive potential of easily accessible journalism which led to a change of wind in official attitudes to education. Until the eighteenth century there was no very widespread feeling that education and literacy might be dangerous and should not be widely extended. Though formal censorship had always been a recognition of the potential dangers brought by literacy, there was a tendency to see this in predominantly religious terms; one duty of the Inquisition was to maintain the effectiveness of the Index. In retrospect, it may well seem that the greater opportunity which literacy and printing gave for the criticism and questioning of authority in general was a more important effect than their subversion of religion. Yet this was not their only importance. The diffusion of technical knowledge also accelerated other kinds of social change. Industrialization would hardly have been possible without greater literacy, and a part of what has been called a ‘scientific revolution’ in the seventeenth century must be attributed to the simple cumulative effect of more rapidly and widely circulated information.

The fundamental sources of this ‘revolution’ none the less lie deeper than this, in changed intellectual attitudes. Their core was a changed view of Man’s relation to nature. From a natural world observed with bemused awe as evidence of God’s mysterious ways, more people were somehow making the great step to a conscious search for means to achieve its manipulation. Although the work of medieval scientists had been by no means as primitive and uncreative as it was once the fashion to believe, it suffered from two critical limitations. One was that it provided very little knowledge that was of practical use and this inhibited attention to it. The second was its theoretical weakness; it had to be surpassed at a conceptual as well as a technical level. In spite of its beneficial irrigation by ideas from the Arab world and a healthy emphasis on definition and diagnosis in some of its branches, medieval science rested on assumptions which were untested, in part because the means of testing them could not be grasped, and in part because the wish to test them did not exist. The dogmatic assertion of the theory that the four elements – fire, air, earth and water – were the constituents of all things, for example, went unrefuted by experiment. Although experimental work of a sort went on within the alchemical and hermetic traditions, and with Paracelsus came to be directed towards other ends than a search for gold, it was still directed by mythical, intuitive conceptions.

This remained broadly true until the seventeenth century. The Renaissance had its scientific manifestations but they found expression usually in descriptive studies (an outstanding example was that of Vesalius’s – the Flemish Andries van Wesel – human anatomy of 1543) and in the solution of practical problems in the arts (such as those of perspective) and mechanical crafts. One branch of this descriptive and classificatory work was particularly impressive, that addressed to making sense of the new geographical knowledge revealed by the discoverers and cosmographers. In geography, said a French physician of the early sixteenth century, ‘and in what pertains to astronomy, Plato, Aristotle, and the old philosophers made progress, and Ptolemy added a great deal more. Yet, were one of them to return today, he would find geography changed past recognition.’ Here was one of the stimuli for a new intellectual approach to the world of nature.

It was not a stimulus quick to operate. A tiny minority of educated men, it is true, would already in 1600 not have found it easy to accept the conventional world picture based on the great medieval synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. Some of them felt an uneasy loss of coherence, a sudden lack of bearings, an alarming uncertainty. But for most of those who considered the matter at all, the old picture still held true, the whole universe still centred on the earth, and the life of the earth upon man, its only rational inhabitant. The greatest intellectual achievement of the next century was to make it impossible for an educated person to think like this. It was so important that it has been seen as the essential change to the modern from the medieval world.

Early in the seventeenth century something new is already apparent in science. The changes which then manifested themselves meant that an intellectual barrier was crossed and the nature of civilization was altered for ever. There appeared in Europe a new attitude, deeply utilitarian, encouraging men to invest time, energy and resources to master nature by systematic experiment. When a later age came to look back for its precursors in this attitude they found the outstanding one to have been Francis Bacon, sometime Lord Chancellor of England, a man of outstanding intellectual energy and many unlikeable personal traits. His works seem to have had little or no contemporary effect, but they attracted posterity’s attention for what seemed a prophetic rejection of the authority of the past.

Bacon advocated a study of nature based upon observation and induction and directed towards harnessing it for human purposes. ‘The true and lawful end of the sciences’, he wrote, ‘is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers.’ Through them could be achieved a ‘restitution and reinvigorating [in great part] of man to the sovereignty and power … which he had in his first state of creation’. This was ambitious indeed – nothing less than the redemption of mankind from the consequences of Adam’s Fall – but Bacon was sure it was possible if scientific research was effectively organized; in this, too, he was a prophetic figure, precursor of later scientific societies and institutions.

The modernity of Bacon was later exaggerated and other men – notably his contemporaries Kepler and Galileo – had much more to say which was of importance in the advance of science. Nor did his successors adhere so closely as he would have wished to a programme of practical discovery of ‘new arts, endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man’s life’ (that is, to a science dominated by technology). Nevertheless, he rightly acquired something of the status of a mythological figure because he went to the heart of the matter in his advocacy of observation and experiment instead of deduction from a priori principles. Appropriately, he is said even to have achieved scientific martyrdom, having caught cold while stuffing a fowl with snow one freezing March day, in order to observe the effects of refrigeration upon the flesh. Forty years later, his central ideas were the commonplace of scientific discourse. ‘The management of this great machine of the world’, said an English scientist in the 1660s, ‘can be explained only by the experimental and mechanical philosophers.’ Here were ideas which Bacon would have understood and approved and which are central to the world which we still inhabit. Ever since the seventeenth century it has been a characteristic of the scientist that he answers questions by means of experiment, and for a long time it was to lead to new attempts to understand what was revealed by these experiments by constructing systems.

This led at first to concentration on the physical phenomena which could best be observed and measured by the techniques available. Technological innovation had arisen from the slow accretion of skills by European workmen over centuries; these skills could now be directed to the solution of problems which would in turn permit the solution of other, intellectual problems. The invention of logarithms and calculus was a part of an instrumentation which had among other components the building of better clocks and optical instruments. When the clockmaker’s art took a great stride forward with the seventeenth-century introduction of the pendulum as a controlling device, it in turn made the measurement of time by precision instruments, and therefore astronomy, much easier. With the telescope came new opportunities to scrutinize the heavens; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood as the result of a theoretical investigation by experiment, but how circulation took place was only made comprehensible when the microscope made it possible to see the tiny vessels through which blood flowed. Telescopic and microscopic observations were not only central to the discoveries of the scientific revolution, moreover, but made visible to laymen something of what was implied in a new world outlook.

What was not achieved for a long time was the line of demarcation between the scientist and philosopher which we now recognize. Yet a new world of scientists had come into being, a true scientific community and an international one, too. Here we come back to printing. The rapid diffusion of new knowledge was very important. The publication of scientific books was not its only form; the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were published and so were, increasingly, the memoirs and proceedings of other learned bodies. Scientists moreover kept up voluminous private correspondences with one another, and the material they recorded in them has provided some of the most valuable evidence for the way in which the scientific revolution actually occurred. Some of these correspondences were published; they were more widely intelligible and read than would be the exchanges of leading scientists today.

One feature of the scientific revolution remarkable to the modern eye is that it was something in which amateurs and part-time enthusiasts played a big part. It has been suggested that one of the most important facts explaining why science progressed in Europe while stagnation overtook even outstanding technical achievement in China was the association with it in Europe of the social prestige of the amateur and the gentleman. The membership of the learned societies which began to appear more widely at about the mid-century was full of gentlemanly dabblers who could not by any stretch of the imagination have been called professional scientists but who lent to these bodies the indefinable but important weight of their standing and respectability, whether or not they got their hands dirty in experimental work.

By 1700 specialization between the major different branches of science already existed, though it was by no means as important as it was to become. Nor was science in those days relentlessly demanding of time; scientists could still make major contributions to their study while writing books on theology or holding administrative office. This suggests some of the limitations of the seventeenth-century revolution; nor could it transcend the limits of the techniques available, which, while they permitted great advances in some fields, tended to inhibit attention to others. Chemistry, for example, made relatively small progress (though few still accepted the Aristotelian scheme of four elements which had still dominated thinking about the constituents of matter in 1600), while physics and cosmology went ahead rapidly and indeed arrived at something of a plateau of consolidation, which resulted in less spectacular but steady advance well into the nineteenth century, when new theoretical approaches reinvigorated them.

Altogether the seventeenth-century scientific achievement was a huge one. First and foremost, it replaced a theory of the universe which saw phenomena as the direct and often unpredictable operation of divine power by a conception of it as a mechanism, in which change proceeded regularly from the uniform and universal working of laws of motion. This was still quite compatible with belief in God. His majesty was not perhaps shown in daily direct intervention but in His creation of a great machine; in the most celebrated analogy God was the great watch-maker. Neither the typical student of science nor the scientific world view of the seventeenth century was anti-religious or anti-theocentric. Though it was indubitably important that new views on astronomy, by displacing man from the centre of the universe, implicitly challenged his uniqueness (it was in 1686 that a book appeared arguing that there might be more than one inhabited world), this was not what preoccupied the men who made the cosmological revolution. For them it was only an accident that the authority of the Church became entangled with the proposition that the sun went around the earth. The new views they put forward merely emphasized the greatness and mysteriousness of God’s ways. They took for granted the possibility of christening the new knowledge as Aristotle had been christened by the Middle Ages.

Long before the German philosopher Kant coined the phrase ‘Copernican revolution’ at the end of the eighteenth century, the roll of the makers of a new cosmology was recognized to begin with the name of Copernicus, a Polish cleric whose book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs, was published in 1543. This was the same year as Vesalius’s great work on anatomy (and, curiously, of the first edition of the works of Archimedes); Copernicus was a Renaissance humanist rather than a scientist – not surprisingly, considering when he lived. In part for philosophic and aesthetic reasons he hit upon the idea of a universe of planets moving around the sun, explaining their motion as a system of cycles and epicycles. It was (so to speak) a brilliant guess, for he had no means of testing the hypothesis and most common-sense evidence told against it.

The first true scientific data in support of heliocentricity was in fact provided by a man who did not accept it, the Dane Tycho Brahe. Besides possessing the somewhat striking distinction of an artificial nose, Brahe began recording the movements of planets, first with rudimentary instruments and then, thanks to a munificent king, from the best-equipped observatory of his age. The result was the first systematic collection of astronomical data to be made within the orbit of the western tradition since the Alexandrian era. Johannes Kepler, the first great Protestant scientist, who was invited by Brahe to assist him, went on to make even more careful observations of his own and provide a second major theoretical step forward. He showed that the movements of planets could be explained as regular if their courses followed ellipses at irregular speeds. This broke at last with the Ptolemaic framework within which cosmology had been more and more cramped and provided the basis of planetary explanation until the twentieth century. After Kepler came Galileo Galilei, who eagerly seized upon the telescope, an instrument seemingly discovered about 1600, possibly by chance. Galileo was an academic, professor at Padua of two subjects characteristically linked in early science: physics and military engineering. His use of the telescope finally shattered the Aristotelian scheme; Copernican astronomy was made visible and the next two centuries were to apply to the stars what was known of the nature of the planets.

Galileo’s major work, nevertheless, was not in observation but in theory and in linking it to technical practice. He first described the physics which made a Copernican universe possible by providing a mathematical treatment of the movement of bodies. With his work, mechanics left the world of the craftsman’s know-how, and entered that of science. What is more, Galileo came to his conclusions as a result of systematic experiment. On this rested what Galileo called ‘two new sciences’, statics and dynamics. The published result was the book in which has been seen the first statement of the revolution in scientific thought, Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World (that of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus) of 1632. Less remarkable than its contents, but still interesting, are the facts that it was written not in Latin but the vernacular Italian, and dedicated to the pope; Galileo was undoubtedly a good Catholic. Yet the book provoked an uproar, rightly, for it meant the end of the Christian-Aristotelian world view which was the great cultural triumph of the medieval Church. Galileo’s trial followed. He was condemned and recanted, but this did not diminish the effect of his work. Copernican and heliocentric views henceforth dominated scientific thinking.

In the year that Galileo died, 1642, Isaac Newton was born. It was his achievement to provide the physical explanation of the Copernican universe; he showed that the same mechanical laws explained both what Kepler and what Galileo had said, and finally brought together terrestrial and celestial knowledge. He employed a new mathematics, the ‘method of fluxions’ or, in later terminology, the ‘infinitesimal calculus’. Newton did not invent this; he applied it to physical phenomena. It provided a way of calculating the positions of bodies in motion. His conclusions were set out in a discussion of the movements of the planets contained in a book which was to prove the most important and influential scientific work since that of Euclid. The Principia, as it is called for short (or, Anglicized, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), demonstrated how gravity sustained the physical universe. The general cultural consequences of this discovery were comparable with those within science. We have no proper standard of measurement, but perhaps they were even greater. That a single law, discovered by observation and calculation, could explain so much was an astonishing revelation of what the new scientific thinking could achieve. Pope has been quoted to excess, but his epigram still best summarizes the impact of Newton’s work on the European mind: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.’

Newton thus in due time became, with Francis Bacon, the second of the canonized saints of a new learning. There was little exaggeration in this in Newton’s case. He was a man of almost universal scientific interests and, as the phrase has it, touched little that he did not adorn. Yet the full significance of much of Newton’s work must always elude the non-scientist. Manifestly, he completed the revolution begun with Copernicus. A dynamic conception of the universe had replaced a static one. His achievement was great enough to provide the physics of the next two centuries and to underpin all the other sciences with a new cosmology.

What was not anticipated by Newton and his predecessors was that this might presage an insoluble conflict of science and religion. Newton, indeed, seems even to have been pleased to observe that the law of gravity did not adequately sustain the view that the universe was a self-regulated system, self-contained once created; if it was not just a watch, its creator could do more than invent it, build it, wind it up and then stand back. He welcomed the logical gap which he could fill by postulating divine intervention, for he was a passionate Protestant apologist.

Churchmen, especially Catholic, nevertheless did not find it easy to come to terms with the new science. In the Middle Ages clerics had made important contributions to science, but from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, very little first-rank scientific work was done by churchmen. This was truer, certainly, of the countries where the Counter-Reformation had triumphed than those where it had not. In the seventeenth century there opened that split between organized religion and science which has haunted European intellectual history ever since, whatever efforts have from time to time been made to patch it up. One symbolic crisis was that of the Neapolitan Giordano Bruno. He was not a scientist but a speculator, formerly a Dominican monk who broke with his Order and wandered about Europe publishing controversial works, dabbling in a magical ‘secret science’ supposedly derived from ancient Egypt. In the end the Inquisition took him and after eight years in its hands he was burnt at Rome for heresy in 1600. His execution became one of the foundations of the later historical mythology of the development of ‘free thought’, of the struggle between progress and religion, as it was to come to be seen.

In the seventeenth century such an antithesis was not much felt by scientists and philosophers. Newton, who wrote copiously on biblical and theological topics and believed his work on the prophetical books to be as flawless as the Principia, seems to have held that Moses knew about the heliocentric theory and recommended his readers to ‘beware of Philosophy and vain deceit and oppositions of science falsely so called’ and to have recourse to the Old Testament. John Napier, the inventor of logarithms, was delighted to have in them a new tool to deploy in deciphering the mysterious references in the Book of Revelation to the Number of the Beast. The French philosopher Descartes formulated what he found to be satisfactory philosophical defences of religious belief and Christian truth coherent with his technically sceptical approach to his subject. This did not prevent him (or the philosophical movement which took its name from him, Cartesianism) from attracting the hostility of the Church. The traditional defenders of religious belief correctly recognized that what was at stake was not only the conclusions people arrived at, but the way that they arrived at them. A rationally argued acceptance of religious belief that started from principles of doubt and demonstrated they could satisfactorily be overcome was a poor ally for a Church which taught that truth was declared by authority. The Church was quite logical in setting aside as irrelevant Descartes’ own devotion and Christianity and correctly (from its own point of view) put all his works on the Index.

The argument from authority was taken up by a French Protestant clergyman of the later seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle, who pointed out its unsatisfactory open-endedness: what authority prescribed the authority? In the end it seemed to be a matter of opinion. Every dogma of traditional Christianity, he suggested, might be refuted if not in accordance with natural reason. With such ideas a new phase in the history of European thought announced itself; it has been called the Enlightenment.

This word and similar ones were used in the eighteenth century in most European languages to characterize what men felt distinguished their own intellectual age and cut it off from what had gone before. The key image is of the letting in of light upon what was dark, but when the German philosopher Kant asked the question ‘What is enlightenment?’ in a famous essay he gave a different answer: liberation from self-imposed tutelage. At its heart lay a questioning of authority. The great heritage to be left behind by the Enlightenment was the generalizing of the critical attitude. In the end, everything was to be exposed to scrutiny. Some felt – and it came in the very long run to be true – that nothing was sacred, but this is somewhat misleading. Enlightenment had its own authority and dogmas; the critical stance itself long went unexamined. Furthermore, enlightenment was as much a bundle of attitudes as a collection of ideas and here lies another difficulty in coming to terms with it. Many streams flowed into it but by no means did they all follow the same course. The roots of enlightenment are confused; development always resembled a continuing debate – sometimes a civil war, so many assumptions did the contestants share – much more than the advance of a united army of the enlightened.

Descartes had argued that systematic doubt was the beginning of firm knowledge. Fifty years later, the English philosopher John Locke provided an account of the psychology of knowledge which reduced its primary constituents to the impressions conveyed by the senses to the mind; there were not, he argued against Descartes, ideas innate in human nature. The mind contained only sense-data and the connections it made between them. This was, of course, to imply that mankind had no fixed ideas of right and wrong; moral values, Locke taught, arose as the mind experienced pain and pleasure. There was to be an enormous future for the development of such ideas; from them would flow theories about education, about society’s duty to regulate material conditions and about many other derivations from environmentalism. There was also a huge past behind them: the dualism which Descartes and Locke both expressed in their distinctions of body and mind, physical and moral, had its roots in Plato and Christian metaphysics. Yet what is perhaps most striking at this point is that his ideas could still be associated by Locke with the traditional framework of Christian belief.

Such incoherences were always to run through the Enlightenment, but its general trend is clear. The new prestige of science, too, seemed to promise that the observations of the senses were, indeed, the way forward to knowledge, and to a knowledge whose value was proved by its utilitarian efficacy. It could make possible the improvement of the world in which men lived. Its techniques could unlock the mysteries of nature and reveal their logical, rational foundations in the laws of physics and chemistry.

All this was long an optimistic creed (the word optimiste entered the French language in the seventeenth century). The world was getting better and would continue to do so. In 1600 things had been very different. Then, the Renaissance worship of the classical past had combined with the upheavals of war and the always latent feeling of religious men that the end of the world could not long be delayed, to produce a pessimistic mood and a sense of decline from a great past. In a great literary debate over whether the achievements of the ancients excelled those of modern times, the writers of the late seventeenth century crystallized the idea of progress which emerged from the Enlightenment.

It was also a non-specialists’ creed. In the eighteenth century it was still possible for an educated man to tie together in a manner satisfactory at least for himself the logic and implications of many different studies. Voltaire was famous as a poet and playwright, but wrote at length on history (he was for a time the French historiographer royal) and expounded Newtonian physics to his countrymen. Adam Smith was renowned as a moral philosopher before he dazzled the world with his Wealth of Nations, a book which may reasonably be said to have founded the modern science of economics.

In such eclecticism religion, too, found a place, yet (as Gibbon put it) ‘in modern times, a latent, and even involuntary, scepticism adheres to the most pious disposition’. In ‘enlightened’ thought there seemed to be small room for the divine and the theological. It was not just that educated Europeans no longer felt hell gaping about them. The world was becoming less mysterious; it also promised to be less tragic. More and more troubles seemed not inseparable from being, but man-made. Awkward problems, it was true, might still be presented by appalling natural disasters such as earthquakes, but if the relief of most ills was possible and if, as one thinker put it, ‘Man’s proper business is to seek happiness and avoid misery’, what was the relevance of the dogmas of Salvation and Damnation? God could still be included in a perfunctory way in the philosopher’s account of the universe, as the First Cause that had started the whole thing going and the Great Mechanic who prescribed the rules on which it ran, but was there any place for His subsequent intervention in its working, either directly by incarnation or indirectly through His Church and the sacraments it conveyed? Inevitably, the Enlightenment brought revolt against the Church, the supreme claimant to intellectual and moral authority.

Here was a fundamental conflict. The rejection of authority by the thoughtful in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was only rarely complete, in the sense that new authority was sought and discovered in what were believed to be the teachings of science and reason. Yet increasingly and more and more emphatically the authority of the past was rejected. As the literary argument over ancient and modern culture undermined the authority of classical teaching, so had the Protestant Reformation exploded the authority of the Catholic Church, the other pillar of traditional European culture. When the Protestant reformers had replaced old priest by new presbyter (or by the Old Testament), they could not undo the work of undermining religious authority which they had begun and which the men of the Enlightenment were to carry much further.

Such implications took some time to emerge, whatever the quickly formulated and justified misgivings of churchmen. The characteristics of advanced thought in the eighteenth century tended to express themselves in fairly practical and everyday recommendations which in a measure masked their tendency. They are probably best summarized in terms of the fundamental beliefs which underlay them and of which they were consequences. At the basis of all others was a new confidence in the power of mind; this was one reason why the enlightened so much admired Bacon, who shared this with them, yet even the creative giants of the Renaissance did not do so much to give Europeans a conviction of intellectual power as did the eighteenth century. On this rested the assurance that almost indefinite improvement was possible. Many thinkers of the age were optimists who saw it as the apex of history. Confidently they looked forward to the improvement of the lot of mankind by the manipulation of nature and the unfolding to man of the truths which reason had written in his heart. Innate ideas bundled out of the front door crept in again by the back stairs. Optimism was qualified only by the realization that there were big practical obstacles to be overcome. The first of these was simply ignorance. Perhaps a knowledge of final causes was impossible (and certainly science seemed to suggest this as it revealed more and more complexity in nature) but this was not the sort of ignorance which worried the enlightened. They had a more everyday level of experience in mind and were confident that ignorance could be dispersed.

The greatest literary embodiment of the Enlightenment had precisely this aim. The great Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert was a huge compilation of information and propaganda in twenty-one volumes published between 1751 and 1765. As some of its articles made clear, another great obstacle to enlightenment was intolerance – especially when it interfered with freedom of publication and debate. The Encyclopédie, said one of its authors, was a ‘war machine’, intended to change minds as well as inform them. Parochialism was yet another barrier to happiness. The values of the Enlightenment, it was assumed, were those of all civilized society. They were universal. Never, except perhaps in the Middle Ages, has the European intellectual élite been more cosmopolitan or shared more of a common language. Its cosmopolitanism was increased by knowledge of other societies, for which the Enlightenment showed an extraordinary appetite. In part this was because of genuine curiosity; accounts of travel and discovery brought to public notice unfamiliar ideas and institutions and thus awoke interest in social and ethical relativities. They provided new grounds for criticism. What was thought to be a humane and enlightened China particularly captured the imagination of eighteenth-century Europeans, a fact which perhaps suggests how superficial was their acquaintance with its realities.

Once ignorance, intolerance and parochialism were removed, it was assumed that the unimpeded operation of the laws of nature, uncovered by reason, would promote the reform of society in everyone’s interest except that of those wedded to the past by their blindness or their enjoyment of indefensible privilege. The Lettres persanes of the French author Montesquieu launched a tradition of suggesting that the institutions of existing societies – in his case the laws of France – could be improved by comparison with the laws of nature. In articulating such a programme, the men of the Enlightenment were appointing themselves as the priesthood of a new social order. In their vision of their role as critics and reformers there emerged for the first time a social ideal which has been with us ever since, that of the intellectual. Moralists, philosophers, scholars, scientists already existed; their defining characteristic was specialized competence. What the Enlightenment invented was the ideal of the generalized critical intellect. Autonomous, rational, continuous and universal criticism was institutionalized as never before and the modern ‘intellectual’ is the outcome.

The eighteenth century did not use this term. It had the type, but called its exemplars simply ‘philosophers’. This was an interesting adaptation and broadening of a word already familiar; it came to connote not the specialized mental pursuit of philosophical studies but the acceptance of a common outlook and critical stance. It was a term with moral and evaluative tones, used familiarly by enemies as well as friends to indicate also a zeal to propagate the truths revealed by critical insight to a large and lay public. The archetypes were a group of French writers soon lumped together in spite of their differences and referred to as philosophes. Their numbers and celebrity correctly suggest the preponderance of France in the central period of Enlightenment thought. Other countries neither produced so many and such conspicuous figures within this tradition, nor did they usually confer such prestige and eminence on those they had.

Yet the presiding deities of the early Enlightenment were the English Newton and Locke; it could be reasonably claimed too that the philosopher who expressed the most extreme development of Enlightenment ideals and methods was Jeremy Bentham, and that its greatest historiographical monument is Gibbon’s work. Further north, Scotland had a great eighteenth-century cultural efflorescence and produced in David Hume one of the most engaging as well as the most acute of the Enlightenment’s technical philosophers, who combined extreme intellectual scepticism with good nature and social conservatism, and in Adam Smith the author of one of the great creative books of modern times. Among Latin countries, Italy was, outside France, most prolific in its contribution to the Enlightenment in spite of the predominance there of the Roman Church. The Italian Enlightenment would be assured of a remembrance even if it had thrown up only Cesare de Beccaria, the author of a book which founded penal reform and the criticism of penology and gave currency to one of the great slogans of history, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. The German Enlightenment was slower to unroll and less productive of figures who won universal acclaim (possibly for linguistic reasons) but produced in Kant a thinker who, if he consciously sought to go beyond the Enlightenment, nevertheless embodied in his moral recommendations much of what it stood for. Only Spain seemed to lag conspicuously. It was not an unfair impression even allowing for the work of one or two enlightened statesmen; Spanish universities in the eighteenth century were still rejecting Newton.

Important though the work of other nations was for the history of civilization, that of the French struck contemporaries the most forcefully. There were many reasons: one lay simply in the glamour of power; France under Louis XIV had won an enduring prestige. Another reason is the magnificent instrument for the diffusion of French culture which lay to hand in the French language. It was in the eighteenth century the lingua franca of Europe’s intellectuals and its people of fashion alike; Maria Theresa and her children used it for their family correspondence and Frederick II wrote (rather bad) verses in it. A European audience was assured for any book written in French and it seems likely that the success of that language actually held back cultural advance in the German tongue.

A shared language made propaganda, discussion and critical comment possible, but what would actually be achieved by way of practical reform in the short term was bound to depend on political circumstance. Some statesmen attempted to put ‘enlightened’ ideas into practice, because there were coincidences between the interests of states and the aims of philosophers. This was especially apparent when ‘enlightened despotisms’ found themselves running into opposition from vested interest and conservatism. Such conflicts were obvious in the enforcement of educational reform at the expense of the Church inside the Habsburg dominions, or in Voltaire’s attacks, written to the brief of a royal minister, on the parlement of Paris when it stood in the way of fiscal innovation. Some rulers, like Catherine the Great of Russia, ostentatiously paraded the influence of Enlightenment ideas on their legislation. Perhaps the most important and influential impact of such ideas, apart from those of utilitarian reform which were deployed against the Church, were always in educational and economic matters. In France, at least, the economic recommendations of enlightened thinkers made their mark on administration.

Religious questions drew the attention of the philosophes with unique power. Religion and religious teaching were, of course, still inseparable from every side of Europe’s life. It was not just that the churches claimed authority in so much, but also that they were physically omnipresent as great corporate interests, both social and economic; religion was involved in some measure in every aspect of society to which the attention of reformers might be drawn. Whether it was because the abuse of sanctuary or clerical privilege stood in the way of judicial reform, or churches’ inalienable land rights impeded economic improvement, or a clerical monopoly of education encumbered the training of administrators, or dogma prevented the equal treatment of loyal and valued subjects, the Roman Catholic Church in particular seemed to find itself always opposing improvement.

But this was not all that drew the fire of the philosophes. Religion could also lead, they thought, to crime. One of the last great scandals of the era of religious persecution was the execution of a Protestant at Toulouse in 1762 on the charge of converting Catholics to heresy. For this he was tortured, tried and executed. Voltaire made this a cause célèbre. His efforts did not change the law, but for all the violence of feeling which continued to divide Catholic and Protestant in southern France, they made it impossible for such a judicial murder ever to be repeated there – or, probably, in France as a whole. Yet France did not give even a limited legal toleration to Protestants until 1787 and then did not extend it to Jews. By that time Joseph II had already introduced religious toleration into his Catholic territories.

This suggests an important limit to the practical success of enlightenment. For all its revolutionary power, it had to operate within the still very restrictive institutional and moral framework of the ancien régime. Its relationship with despotism was ambiguous: it might struggle against the imposition of censorship or the practice of religious intolerance in a theocratic monarchy, but could also depend on despotic power to carry out reform. Nor, it must be remembered, were enlightened ideas the only stimulus to improvement. The English institutions Voltaire admired did not stem from enlightenment, and many changes in eighteenth-century England owed more to religion than to ‘philosophy’.

The greatest political importance of the Enlightenment lay in its legacies to the future. It clarified and formulated many of the key demands of what was to be called ‘liberalism’, though here, too, its legacy is ambiguous, for the men of the Enlightenment sought not freedom for its own sake but freedom for the consequences it would bring. The possibility of contriving that mankind should be happy on earth was the great insight of the eighteenth century; the age may be said, indeed, not merely to have invented earthly happiness as a feasible goal but also the thought that it could be measured (Bentham wrote of a ‘felicific calculus’) and that it could be promoted through the exercise of reason. Above all, the Enlightenment diffused the idea that knowledge, in its social tendency, was fundamentally benign and progressive, and therefore that it should be trusted. Those ideas all had profound political implications.

Apart from this, the age made its best-known contribution to the future European liberal tradition in a more specific and negative form; the Enlightenment created classical anti-clericalism. Criticism of what the Roman Church had done led to support for attacks by the state upon ecclesiastical organizations and authority. The struggles of Church and State had many roots other than philosophical, but could always be presented as a part of a continuing war of Enlightenment and rationality against superstition and bigotry. In particular, the papacy attracted criticism – or contempt; Voltaire seems to have once believed that it would in fact disappear before the end of the century. The greatest success of the philosophes in the eyes of their enemies and of many of their supporters was the papal dissolution of the Society of Jesus in 1773.

A few philosophes carried their attacks on the Church beyond the institutions to an attack on religion itself. Out-and-out atheism (together with deterministic materialism) had its first serious expression in the eighteenth century, but it remained unusual. Most of those during the Enlightenment era who thought about these things were probably sceptical about the dogmas of the Church, but kept up a vague theism. Certainly, too, they believed in the importance of religion as a social force. As Voltaire said, ‘one must have religion for the sake of the people’. He, in any case, continued throughout his life to assert, with Newton, the existence of God and died formally at peace with the Church.

Here is a hint of something always in danger of being lost to sight in the Enlightenment: the importance of the non-intellectual and non-rational side of human nature. The most prophetic figure of the century in this respect and one who quarrelled bitterly with many of the leading figures among the ‘enlightened’ and the philosophes was the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His importance in the history of thought lies in his impassioned pleas that due weight be given to the feelings and the moral sense, both in danger of eclipse by rationality. Because of this, he thought, the men of his day were stunted creatures, partial and corrupt beings, deformed by the influence of a society which encouraged this eclipse.

European culture was to be deeply marked by Rousseau’s vision, sometimes perniciously. He planted (it has been well said) a new torment in every soul. There can be found in his writings a new attitude to religion (which was to revivify it), a new psychological obsession with the individual which was to flood into art and literature, the invention of the sentimental approach to nature and natural beauty, the origins of the modern doctrine of nationalism, a new child-centredness in educational theory, a secularized puritanism (rooted in a mythical view of ancient Sparta), and much else besides. All these things had both good and bad consequences; Rousseau was, in short, the key figure in the making of what has been called Romanticism. In much he was an innovator, and often one of genius. Much, too, he shared with others. His distaste for the Enlightenment erosion of community, his sense that men were brothers and members of a social and moral whole was, for example, expressed just as eloquently by the Irish author Edmund Burke, who nevertheless drew from it very different conclusions. Rousseau was in some measure voicing views beginning to be held by others as the age of Enlightenment passed its zenith. Yet of Rousseau’s central and special importance to Romanticism there can be no doubt.

‘Romanticism’ is a much used and much misused term. It can be properly applied to things which seem diametrically opposed. Soon after 1800, for example, some men would deny any value to the past and would seek to overthrow its legacies just as violently as men of the Enlightenment had done, while at the same time others tenaciously defended historic institutions. Both can be (and have been) called Romantics, because in each of them moral passion counted for more than intellectual analysis. The clearest link between such antitheses lay in the new emphasis of Romantic Europe on feeling, intuition and, above all, the natural. Romanticism, whose expressions were to be so manifold, started almost always from some objection to enlightened thought, whether from disbelief that science could provide an answer to all questions, or from a revulsion against rational self-interest. But its positive roots lay deeper than this, in the Reformation’s displacement of so many traditional values by the one supreme value of sincerity; it was not entirely wrong to see Romanticism, as some Catholic critics saw it, as a secularized Protestantism, for above all it sought authenticity, self-realization, honesty, moral exaltation. Unhappily it did so all too often without regard to cost. The great effects were to reverberate through the nineteenth century, usually with painful results, and in the twentieth century would affect many other parts of the world as one of the last manifestations of the vigour of European culture.