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 therefore, after the Middle Ages, allowed itself to be overtaken by the West and then dropped further and further behind (his answer is discussed on pages 439–440).4 The same might be said about Islam. Baghdad in the ninth century led the Mediterranean world intellectually: it was here that the great classics of the ancient civilisations were translated, where the hospital was conceived, where al-jabr, or algebra, was developed, and major advances made in falsafah, philosophy. By the eleventh century, thanks to the rigours of fundamentalism, it had disappeared. Charles Freeman, in his recent book The Closing of the Western Mind, describes many instances of the way intellectual life withered in the early Middle Ages, the years of Christian fundamentalism.5 In the fourth century Lactantius wrote: ‘What purpose does knowledge serve – for as to knowledge of natural causes, what blessing is there for me if I should know where the Nile rises, or whatever else under the heavens the “scientists” rave about?’6 Epilepsy, which Hippocrates described as a natural illness as early as the fifth century BC, was, in the Middle Ages, placed under the care of St Christopher. John of Gaddesden, an English physician, recommended as a cure the reading of the Gospel over the epileptic while simultaneously placing on him the hair of a white dog.7
This is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from a history of ideas: that intellectual life – arguably the most important, satisfying and characteristic dimension to our existence – is a fragile thing, easily destroyed or wasted. In the last chapter some conclusions will be attempted, in an effort to assess what has and has not been achieved in this realm. This Introduction, however, shows how this history differs from other histories, and in so doing helps explain what a history of ideas is. The discussion will be confined to an exploration of the various ways the material for an intellectual history may be organised. A history of ideas clearly touches on a vast amount of material and ways must be found to make this array manageable.
For some reason, numerous figures in the past have viewed intellectual history as a tripartite system – organised around three grand ideas, ages or principles. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) argued – heretically – that there have been three epochs, presided over by God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit respectively, during which the Old Testament, the New Testament and a ‘spiritual eternal Gospel’ will be in force.8 Jean Bodin (c. 1530–1596), the French political philosopher, divided history into three periods – the history of Oriental peoples, the history of Mediterranean peoples, and the history of northern peoples.9 In 1620 Francis Bacon identified three discoveries that set his age apart from ancient times.10 ‘It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world, the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.’11 The origins of each of these discoveries have been identified since Bacon’s time but that does not change the force of his arguments.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Bacon’s amanuensis, argued that three branches of knowledge outweighed all others in explanatory power: physics, which studies natural objects; psychology, which studies man as an individual; and politics, which deals with artificial and social groupings of mankind. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) distinguished the age of the gods, the heroic age and the human age (though he borrowed some of these ideas from Herodotus and Varro). In fact, Vico tended to think in threes: he distinguished three ‘instincts’ which, he said, shaped history, and three ‘punishments’ that shaped civilisation.12 The three instincts were a belief in Providence, the recognition of parenthood, and the instinct to bury the dead, which gave mankind the institutions of religion, family and sepulture.13 The three punishments were shame, curiosity and the need to work.14 The French statesman Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) argued that civilisation is the product of geographical, biological and psychological factors (Saint-Simon agreed). Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who thought that the French Revolution was the dividing line between the past and a ‘glorious future’, believed there were three outstanding issues in history – the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within one and the same nation, and the perfecting of mankind. William Godwin (1756–1836), the English anarchist, thought that the three chief ideas that would produce the all-important goal in life – the triumph of reason and truth – were literature, education and (political) justice. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) noted ‘the three greatest elements of modern civilisation [are] gunpowder, printing and the Protestant religion’, while Auguste Comte (1798–1857) idealised three stages of history – theological, metaphysical and scientific, later expanded to theological-military, metaphysical-legalistic, and scientific-industrial.15 Later still in the nineteenth century the anthropologist Sir James Frazer distinguished the ages of magic, religion and science, while Lewis Morgan, in his Ancient Society, divided history into the stages of savagery, barbarism and civilisation, and thought that the main organising ideas of civilisation were the growth of government, the growth of ideas about the family, and the growth of ideas about property.