The elements in this view of the world — just beginning to take shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth obliterated all competition, to the extent that for nineteenth-century man it was the only one feasible, so obvious that one didn’t even realize it existed — were at first few and far between. They didn’t know about each other, and there wasn’t any forum in which they could come together. One element might exist in a chain of thoughts of someone in Baden, tumbling round and round in the darkness above the cliff edge of consciousness together with all his other thoughts, which were strangers to it, with which it had nothing in common, but nevertheless cohabited. Another element might exist as a potential in a cupboard in a study in Florence, where it might remain for several years waiting for the chance event that would realize it and give it shape, initially as a thought, and then in writing. But before that a retort had to burst, a hand had to be cut, a few steps taken, the cupboard door opened and a pair of eyes rest their gaze on the object there, the top level of a series of events supported by the massive number of coincidences needed to bring a particular individual into the world, give him a particular life, that leads him to a particular place at a particular time. There are millions of such elements, perhaps even billions, but they all existed in what were for them alien environments, many of them in books written in antiquity or the Middle Ages, which may have been lost in the West but were translated into Arabic, where they lived on throughout the last centuries, and now suddenly are translated back, because of some movement or other in this or that market, because of this or that war, because of this or that mad prince’s whim five generations ago. Discoveries with unintended side effects. New celestial bodies. New continents. There were millions of them, but compared with everything that is contained and moves within cultures, they were few and very far between. These few and far-flung elements in what was to become a worldview were very like predators with vast hunting grounds. When the time is right and the desire to multiply manifests itself, everything else pales into insignificance. They cover huge distances in search of their mate. Something that is like them, but not identical, because there has to be a small difference that makes a union and an increase possible. All other signs suddenly become meaningless, they no longer see the world around them, only the part of it that leads to the only creature that is like them. And that one is searching too! Slowly but surely they zero in on each other, the leagues become miles, the miles become yards, and then there they are sniffing one another.
What suddenly caused the elements in the new worldview to begin searching for each other, and to find each other, no one can say with any certainty. All we know is that they began to gather in clusters. They gathered in certain minds (the so-called great men), and the more of them there were, the more intense became the hunt for more, until at last they dominated the host’s mind entirely. And because they’d chosen the very finest minds, the greatest men of the age, they continued to grow, because this was a man people listened to, this was a man who could state a case convincingly, and this was a man who attracted other great men, and then things really started moving. That the occasional one was burned at the stake by men whom the elements of this new worldview had not enlightened was unfortunate, but was of no importance in the wider context. Throughout the eighteenth century it grew, until by the nineteenth century it was fully developed, and only small adjustments remained to be done, which the small but enthusiastic people of the twentieth century were more than happy to supply.
The new worldview, which began to take shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, didn’t just mold the future, but also the past. The story of the past was divided in two, one part dealt with culture, the other nature. The new worldview had a slightly patronizing attitude to cultural history, as all the people there had always held different views, and consequently had never understood the true nature of the world, whereas the history of natural things was seen as something objective, something that had developed outside the human sphere, and that the human sphere was only now, for the first time, capable of mapping out. A past was constructed from the contemporary view of the world, and so this past always affirmed the contemporary view of the world, in a vicious circle that nothing seemed able to break. It’s become an everlasting round. Mistake confirms mistake confirms mistake. For it isn’t like that, but like this:
The history of natural things is indissolubly linked with the history of mankind. Everything we know is inextricably linked with loss and oblivion. And what knowledge does conquer is so infinitesimally small in comparison with what it jettisons that we might reasonably suspect it of being in retreat: why else does it always set its abandoned landscapes on fire?
Sir Isaac Newton, who described gravity and laid the foundations for mechanistic philosophy in his masterwork Principia Mathematica (1687), spent a considerably larger part of his time on alchemy than on the science his fame rests on, and all through his life remained fascinated by King Solomon’s temple, the proportions of which he believed were not only a paradigm for the universe, but also for mankind, so that by calculating the building’s dimensions, and then putting the figures into the Bible’s prophetic texts, one could see into the future. (Newton calculated, among other things, that the great trials of the Jews would end in 1944, and Christ would return in 1948.) And Sir Thomas Browne, who in Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646) attempted to tidy up all the misunderstandings that unreasonable interpretations of the Bible and the classics of antiquity had occasioned over the years, published Hydriotaphia — Urn-Burial just a dozen years later, where he elicits proof that it was the River Jordan that once ran through the Garden of Eden, and that Noah was the same person as the Roman god Saturn. The book also contains a dissertation on the significance of the number five in the world, in which the occurrence of the quincunx, i.e., the pattern representing the number five on a die, which according to Browne was found everywhere in nature ever since the creation, forms a key part. Galileo Galilei, for his part, tried to unite science and the revelation in a less well-known thesis, Letter to Castelli, in 1614.