The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

Newton, a passionate believer in the Biblical prophecies, still pointed toward a practical world chronology based on objective, planet-wide events. In the long run, the kind of base dates that Newton’s astronomy recommended would offer usable lines of contemporaneity around the world. People might never agree on the date of the Creation—many would not believe in the Nativity—but all could, and would, share a syntax of history. Modern chronology came when the old provincial schemes of naming years and epochs by reigning monarchs or dynasties or by magical portents were displaced by a common scheme of numbering. Only very late in the history of our planet did “century” become a widely accepted yardstick of time. In English usage, for example, “century” (from Latin centuria, designating a company of one hundred men) originally meant any group of one hundred things, just as Shakespeare has Imogen in Cymbeline announce her hope to say “a century of prayers.” People still spoke of a “century of years.” Not until our “seventeenth century” did the lone word “century” begin to mean one of the successive periods of one hundred years from the beginning of the Christian era. This was a small clue to a great change.