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 26-27. 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 mentalites , 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 Emile , 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 Encyclopedie , in France in the eighteenth century, thought this approach would advance knowledge: 'Since "everything in nature is linked together", since "beings are connected with