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.
Prologue
The Discovery of Time
On the evening of Wednesday, 1 May 1859, John Evans, a British archaeologist, crossed the English Channel by steamer from Folkestone to Boulogne. He took the train to Abbeville where he was met by Joseph Prestwich, a renowned British geologist. Next morning they were collected at seven o’clock by Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, chief customs officer in the town but also an amateur archaeologist. Evans and Prestwich were in France to investigate certain discoveries of their host.
Since 1835 workmen quarrying gravel from the river on the outskirts of Abbeville had been turning up ancient animal bones alongside different types of stone implements. These stone tools had convinced Boucher de Perthes that mankind was much more ancient than it said in the Bible. According to a number of ecclesiastical authorities, basing their calculations on the genealogies in Genesis, mankind was created between 6,000 and 4,000 years before Christ. Boucher de Perthes had been confirmed in his very different view when, in the course of excavations made for a new hospital in the Abbeville area, three stone hand-axes had been found alongside the molar tooth of a species of elephant long since extinct in France.
Nonetheless, he had great difficulty convincing his fellow Frenchmen that his ‘evidence’ proved that man dated back hundreds of thousands of years. There was no shortage of expertise in France at that time – Laplace in astronomy, Cuvier, Lartet and Scrope in geology and natural history, Picard in palaeontology. But in the latter discipline the experts tended to be ‘amateurs’ in the true sense of the word, lovers of the subject who were scattered about the country, digging in their own localities only, and divorced from the high-profile publication outlets, such as the French Academy. Furthermore, in Boucher de Perthes’ case his credibility was a particular problem because he had taken up archaeology only in his fifties, and had before that authored several five-act plays, plus works on political, social and metaphysical subjects, filling no fewer than sixty-nine heavy volumes. He was seen in some circles as a jack-of-all-trades. It didn’t help either that he presented his discoveries as part of a fantastic theory that early man had been completely wiped out by a worldwide catastrophe and later on created anew. The British were more sympathetic, not because their scientists were better than the French – they were not – but because similar discoveries had been made north of the Channel – in Suffolk, in Devon, and in Yorkshire. In 1797, John Frere, a local antiquary, found at Hoxne, near Diss in Suffolk, a number of hand-axes associated with extinct animals in a natural stratum about eleven feet below the surface. In 1825, a Catholic priest, Father John MacEnery, excavating Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay in Devon, found ‘an unmistakeable flint implement’ in association with a tooth of an extinct rhinoceros – both lying in a level securely sealed beneath a layer of stalagmite.1 Then, in 1858, quarrying above Brixham harbour, not far away and also in Devon, exposed a number of small caves, and a distinguished committee was set up by the Royal Society and the Geographical Society to sponsor a scientific excavation. Fossilised bones of mammoth, lion, rhinoceros, reindeer and other extinct Pleistocene animals were found embedded in a layer of stalagmite and, beneath that, ‘flints unmistakably shaped by man’.2 That same year, Dr Hugh Falconer, a distinguished British palaeontologist, and a member of the committee which sponsored the Brixham excavations, happened to call on Boucher de Perthes on his way to Sicily. Struck by what he saw, Falconer persuaded Prestwich and Evans, as members of the professional disciplines most closely involved, to see for themselves what had been unearthed at Abbeville.