Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

There is little doubt too that knowledge was being reorganised in new and more modern ways. Peter Burke, for example, has described this reorganisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word ‘research’ was first used in Étienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France in 1560.94

Richard Westfall has outlined what are perhaps the more important ways in which ideas changed during the scientific revolution. Beforehand, he says, theology was queen of all the sciences–now, it is ‘not allowed on the premises any more’.97 ‘A once Christian culture has become a scientific one…Scientists of today can read and recognise works done after 1687. It takes a historian to comprehend those written before 1543.’

Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, born in 1638, became king in 1643 and achieved his age of majority in 1661. Until his reign, the last sentence on laws in France usually read: ‘In the presence and with the consent of the prelates and barons.’ Later that changed to: ‘Le roi a ordonné et établi par délibération de son conseil ’, ‘The king has resolved by deliberation in his council’.

In 1309 the popes began their exile at Avignon. In 1339 the Hundred Years War was begun between England and France. Increasing famines and plague culminated in the Black Death of 1348–1349. The Jacquerie, the French peasant insurrection, took place in 1358 and the Great Ecclesiastical Schism lasted from 1378 to 1417. There were risings in England and France in 1381–1382 and the Habsburgs were defeated by the Swiss Confederation four years later. In 1395 the Turks destroyed the Hungarian army at Nikopolis, the beginning of a campaign that culminated in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople.

‘John Locke is the prophet of the English business commonwealth, of the rule of law and toleration. It was from the political speculation of Locke (1632–1704) and the actual working out in England of the principles of toleration and limited monarchy, that the French thinkers of the Enlightenment drew their inspiration. In their turn, they reinterpreted and generalised the more liberal aspects of English thought, so that it was translated from a local into a world influence.’

In Britain, for example, the number of books published rose from about 400 per year in the early seventeenth century, to 6,000 a year by 1630, 21,000 in 1710 and fully 56,000 by the 1790s.70 He notes that in the eighteenth century in Germany there was at

Subject 1625 1800 Law 7.4% 3.5% Medicine 7.5 4.9 History etc. 12.0 15.7 Theology 45.8 6.0 Philosophy 18.8 39.6 Belles lettres 5.4 27.3

In contrast, the public concert was a wholly new medium. Blanning says that the first public concert, in the modern sense (a clear distinction being made between audience and performers, an anonymous public admitted on payment of a fee), took place in London, at John Banister’s house, ‘over against’ the George Tavern, in Whyte Freyers, in 1672.

Atheism is a Greek word. The first recorded atheist in history was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (fl. 480–450 BC).

For Christians of the world in which Montaigne grew up, the chief purpose of someone’s intellectual life was to secure salvation in the world to come (he was especially critical of Luther).25 Philosophy’s main function, in such a world, as the handmaiden of theology, was likewise ‘the preparation of man for a safe death’.26 Montaigne thought this was nonsense and reversed the proposition, arguing that the purpose of knowledge is to teach men how to live more adequately, more productively, more happily, right here on earth.

Martin Luther, in one of his ‘Table Talks’, held in 1539, was quoted as saying: ‘People give ear to an upstart astrologer [sic] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon…This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.’37 As biblical citation was increasingly used against the Copernicans, they were labelled either ‘infidels’ or ‘atheists’. Eventually, about 1610, when the Catholic church officially joined the battle against the new astronomy, the charge became one of formal heresy.38 In 1616 De revolutionibus and all other works that affirmed the earth’s motion were placed on the Index and Catholics were forbidden to teach or even to read Copernican doctrines.

Not until 1822 did the church permit books to be printed which accepted that the earth’s motion was real, a delay which fatally damaged Catholic science and likewise church prestige.

Using the genealogies in the Bible, Joseph Justus Scaliger worked out that Creation took place on 23 April 3947 BC, Kepler chose 3992 BC, while Archbishop James Ussher went still further, in his Annals of the Old and New Testament (1650–1653), in which he calculated that the week of Creation began on Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, and that Adam was created on Friday, 28 October 4004 BC. Finally, John Lightfoot (1602–1675), a rabbinical scholar, added to Ussher’s calculations, working out that Adam was born on Friday, 28 October 4004 BC, at nine o’clock in the morning.

And so, at that stage, although the church regarded any figure that was substantially at variance from 4000 BC as heresy, the French natural historian Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, in his Les époques de la nature (1779), calculated the age of the earth, first, as 75,000 years, later as 168,000 years, though his private opinion, never published in his lifetime, was that it was nearer half a million years old.

Diderot’s declared aim was not only to produce a body of knowledge but to deliberately manufacture a change in the way men thought: pour changer la façon commune de penser.6 The publication of the Encyclopédie is itself a chapter in the history of ideas. First appearing in 1751, it took twenty years to appear in full, and was alternately welcomed and suppressed by the censors.7 Financially, it was very profitable for the publishers but Diderot was sent to prison more than once and several plates and articles were confiscated.

The Encyclopédie first found its feet in the twice-weekly dinners in Baron d’Holbach’s hôtel in the rue Royale Saint-Roche (now 8 rue des Moulins), which became known as a ‘synagogue of atheists’.

The first volume, covering the letter A, appeared in June 1751 with its full title: Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, Arts et Métiers, with a ‘Preliminary Discourse’ by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, in which he explained that the work would serve as both encyclopaedia and dictionary, giving an ‘eagle’s-eye’ view of knowledge that would show ‘the secret routes’ that connected different branches.

The print-run of the Spectator later rose to between 20,000 and 30,000, on some accounts, giving a ‘circulation’, on Addison’s calculations, of roughly half a million (the population of England in 1700 was a little over six million).

In 1796 the Monthly Review noted that twice as many novels had been published that year as in the previous one.

It was a time when many of the modern ‘disciplines’ that we recognise today–language studies (philology), law, history, moral and natural philosophy, psychology, sociology–either came into existence fully formed, or as proto-subjects, which would coalesce in the nineteenth century (for example, the word ‘psychology’ did not gain widespread currency in English until the 1830s, though it had been used, in Latin, in Germany).

In this book, prepared in draft as early as 1671, Locke himself used the word ‘mind’ not ‘soul’, and referred to experience and observation as the source of ideas, rather than some ‘innate’ or religious (revelatory) origin.

The brain, in fact, had been explored as early as the 1660s, by Thomas Willis, one of the generation of early scientists who, with Wren, Hooke and Boyle, was in at the birth of the Royal Society.

His book The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves (1664) did much to move the seat of the passions and the soul from the heart, making him famous in the process.

This was L’homme machine (Man a Machine) by the French surgeon Julien Offray de La Mettrie, published in 1747, though to escape censorship in France he was forced to release his book in Leiden. In arguing that thought is a property of matter ‘on a par with electricity’, he was coming down on the side of determinism, materialism and atheism, all of which were to land him in hot water.

The first British figure of consequence in the development of economics was William Petty (1623–1687), the Fellow of the Royal Society whom we met in Chapter 23 and who coined the phrase ‘Political Arithmetick’, the title of one of his books. He attempted a comprehensive quantification of Britain’s capital assets, public finances and population (harder than it sounds, because Parliament did not sanction a census until 1801, and it wasn’t comprehensive until1851).

He published The Theory of the Moral Sentiments in 1759, a work which Alexander Wedderburn, founder of the Edinburgh Review, described as disclosing ‘the deepest principles of philosophy’. But it is for The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, that Smith is remembered and revered around the world.

But he himself felt that allowing absolute freedom of economic activity was itself a form of morality. Among other things, his book was a morally-outraged attack on the monopolistic practices of the grain trade.82 He championed the interests of the consumer against the monopolists, identifying consumer demand as the engine for the creation of wealth.83

‘The architect John Wood, writing in 1749, listed the novelties introduced since the accession of George II. Cheap and dirty floorboards gave way to superior deal covered with carpets. Primitive plaster was concealed with smart wainscoting. Stone hearths and chimney-pieces, customarily cleaned with a whitewash which left a chalk debris on the floor, were replaced with marble. Flimsy doors with iron fittings were abandoned for hardwood embellished with brass locks. Mirrors had become both numerous and elegant. Walnut and mahogany, in fashionable designs, superseded primitive oak furniture. Leather, damask, and embroidery gave seating a comfort unobtainable with cane or rush…The carpets, wall-hangings, furnishings, kitchen and parlour ware in the homes of many shopkeepers and tradesmen in the 1760s and 1770s, would have surprised their parents and astonished their grandparents.’

in 1803, in which he expanded his argument. In these works Malthus produced a very pessimistic view of the future. His view was that there are laws of human nature and that one basic law is that the rate of population growth increases geometrically whereas the production of food increases only arithmetically. It follows from this that conditions of scarcity are a permanent feature of the human condition.

Both Voltaire’s The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and David Hume’s History of England (1754–1762) questioned dogmatic Christianity as the central theme of historical change,

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) ‘ended on a tone of irreparable loss rather than excitement over the foundation of Christian Europe’.

As early as the fourteenth century the Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) had argued that history was a science and should seek to explain the origin and development of civilisation, which he likened to the life of an individual organism.

Voltaire wrote three works of history. The first concerned a single individual, Charles XII (1728), the second an entire century, The Century of Louis XIV (1751), and the third–his most important work–was the 1756 Essay on Customs (Essai sur le moeurs et l’esprit des nations), much more ambitious than the other books, aiming, as he put it, to explain the causes for ‘the extinction, revival, and progress of the human mind’.

Probably the most complete–certainly the most elaborate–idea about progress was that devised by the marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) in his Outline of an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, released in 1795. He took the view that ‘nature has assigned no limit to the perfecting of the human faculties, that the perfectibility of man…has no other limit than the duration of the globe on which nature has placed us’.110 He divided history into ten stages: hunters and fishermen; shepherds; tillers of the soil; the time of commerce, science and philosophy in Greece; science and philosophy from Alexander to the fall of the Roman empire; decadence to the crusades; the crusades to the invention of printing; printing to the attacks on authority by Luther, Descartes and Bacon; Descartes to the Revolution, ‘when reason, tolerance and humanity were becoming the watchwords of all’.

The eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, was characterised by the first attempts to apply the methods and approach of the natural sciences to man himself.

Each played its part in what became the industrial revolution: at Coalbrookdale in 1709, Abraham Darby smelted iron with coal; at Derby in 1721, the silk-thrower Thomas Lombe designed and constructed the world’s first recognisable factory; in Preston in 1732, Richard Arkwright was born; in Birmingham in 1741 or 1742, John Wyatt and Lewis Paul first applied the system of spinning cotton by rollers, which Arkwright would appropriate and improve.

One type of machine was invented by James Hargreaves in the 1760s and another patented by Richard Arkwright, a baker by trade. Their devices employed a series of spindles and rollers to gradually build up the tension. A decade or so later, Samuel Crompton invented a machine which performed both the functions of the other two men’s devices and the spinning machine was more or less perfected.8

Everyone knew this and more than one inventor grasped that one way to reduce iron ore would be to rid coal of its gases, thus converting it into coke, which enabled higher temperatures to be built up more safely.13 This was first achieved around 1709, the ironmasters who made it being Abraham Darby and his family, who managed to keep their secret for more than thirty years.14 The raw iron they produced still needed to be purified, to make it workable, but in time cast iron became, in Peter Hall’s words, the plastic of its day.

In 1760 (generally regarded as the very beginning of the industrial revolution), Britain imported around 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton. In 1787 that had risen to 22 million pounds and by 1837 to 366 million pounds. At the same time, the price of yarn had fallen to about one-twentieth of what it had been and almost all of the workers in the cotton industry, save for the hand-loom weavers, worked in mills under factory conditions.

This fundamental change in the experience of work became all the more obvious when the invention of steam engines made the factory city possible. In 1750 there had been only two cities in Britain with more than 50,000 inhabitants–London and Edinburgh. By 1801 that had grown to eight, and to twenty-nine in 1851, including nine over 100,000, meaning that by this time more Britons lived in towns than lived in the country, another first.

Britain led the way in the industrial revolution, partly because many of the inventions were conceived there but also because the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars held mainland Europe back until around 1815.

Polytechnique (originally the École Central des Travaux Publics) in 1794.

b

The École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, designed to teach engineers and business managers, was founded privately in 1829 but was taken into the state system in 1856.

But the first real excitement was generated by Stephen Gray in 1729 when he was led to a more developed idea of electricity as something that could be sent over large distances.

In 1795 Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), professor of physics at Pavia, showed that electricity could be produced by putting two different pieces of metal together, with a liquid or damp cloth between them, thus creating the first electrical current battery.

But these batteries were very expensive to produce and it was only when Humphry Davy, in 1802, isolated the new metals sodium and potassium, at the Royal Institution in London, that electricity began to be the subject of serious experimentation.

Eighteen years later, in 1820, Hans Christian Oersted in Copenhagen discovered that an electric current could deflect a compass needle and the final link ...

This is not so surprising as it may seem now. Paracelsus’ 1597 book, Alchemia, is the first good book on chemistry.

But when gases were taken into account, this led immediately to Mikhail Lomonosov’s principle of the conservation of matter, established as fundamental by Antoine Lavoisier in 1785.

After isolating the gas in 1774, Priestley went on to show, by experiment, that ‘dephlogisticated air’, or oxygen as we now call it, was used up, both in burning and in breathing.