Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 ; Henry Steel Commager, The Empire of Reason ; Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society ; Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals ; Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas ; Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious ; J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New ; Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book ; Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus ; Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorised Version ; Paula Fredericksen, From Jesus to Christ ; Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind ; Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation ; Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 6500 to 3500 BC ; Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages ; Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation ; David Harris (editor), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia ; Alvin M. Josephy (editor), America in 1492 ; John Keay, India: A History ; William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance ; Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra ; Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution ; Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe ; David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations ; David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity ; David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science ; A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being ; Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought ; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America ; Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind ; Joseph Needham, The Great Titration ; Joseph Needham et al ., Science and Civilisation in China ; Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East ; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man and People and Empires ; J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance ; L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars ; E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History ; Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age ; H. W. F. Saggs, Before Greece and Rome ; Harold C. Schonberg, Lives of the Composers ; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance ; Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences ; Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind ; Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail ; Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak ; Keith Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel ; G. J. Whitrow, Time in History ; Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual . I would also like to draw attention to the sponsors and editors of the various university presses around the world. Many of the most interesting and important books discussed in the following pages were never going to be commercial propositions; but university presses exist, at least in part, to see that new ideas get into print: we are all in their debt. Nor should we forget the translators (some anonymous, some long-departed) of so many of the works described in this book. As Leo Rosten acknowledged, linguistic skills ought not to be taken for granted. In the chapters on China I have used the Pinyin system of transliteration as opposed to Wade-Giles, except for certain words where the Wade-Giles format is well-known even to non-specialists (Pinyin dispenses with all apostrophes and hyphens in Chinese words). In transcribing other scripts (for example, Arabic, Greek, Sanskrit) I have omitted virtually all diacritical marks, on the grounds that most readers will not know how, for example, a or e modifies the sound. Marks are included only where essential-for example, to distinguish the Russian prehistoric site of Mal'ta from the Mediterranean island of Malta. For the most part I have referred to the books of the Hebrew Bible as scriptures. Occasionally, for the sake of variety, I have used Old Testament. My greatest debt, as always, is to Kathrine.
Introduction The Most Important Ideas in History Some Candidates To Introduction Notes and References 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