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

by Peter Watson

Priestley well realised the importance of what he was discovering for he went on to demonstrate that, in sunlight, green plants produce oxygen from the fixed air–carbon dioxide–that they absorbed. Thus was born the idea of the carbon cycle–from the atmosphere (another new idea of the time), through plants and animals and back to the atmosphere.

The study of gases also led John Dalton (1766–1844), a Quaker and schoolteacher in Manchester, England, to his atomic theory. He had a particular interest in the elasticity of

Faraday further demonstrated that the rate of transport of atoms in solution was related to the weights of the substances, which eventually led to the idea that there are ‘atoms’ of electricity, what we now call electrons. But they were not identified until 1897, by J. J. Thomson.

Its members (known agreeably as ‘lunatics’) met informally to begin with, in the homes of different friends. Formal meetings began around1775. The group was led by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and met monthly on the Monday nearest the full moon. Meetings petered out in 1791 after a riot at Priestley’s house (see below).

Priestley was certainly bold enough in his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), in which he may well have been the first to argue that the happiness of the greatest number is the standard by which government should be judged.

Wilkinson’s father was an ironmaster and John too became brilliantly adept in the use of the metal. Abraham Darby and he designed and erected the famous bridge of iron at Ironbridge, opened in 1779.

The 1840s were known, even at the time, as the ‘Hungry Forties’. Riots, mostly related to food shortages, broke out in Britain in 1811–1813, 1815–1817, 1819, 1826, between 1829 and 1835, in 1838–1842, 1843–1844 and 1846–1848.

As a result, during the 1860s Marx himself became a political figure. Particularly after publication of the first volume of Capital, in 1867, he was taken up by the various European revolutionary movements, as the man who had, after years of research in the British Museum, provided scientific validation of revolutionary action.

For example, his ideas were behind the Working Men’s International Association, the so-called ‘First International’, which was established in 1864, and where the term ‘Marxism’ was first used.

Among the imaginative responses to the industrial revolution was a set of ‘industrial novels’, written and set in Britain. These included Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), both by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sybil (1845), by Benjamin Disraeli, a future prime minister of Great Britain, Alton Locke (1850), by Charles Kingsley, Felix Holt (1866), by George Eliot, and Hard Times (1854), by Charles Dickens, an extract from which began this chapter. The main themes of these books were not only criticism of the new society, but also a fear of violence that was felt might erupt from the working classes at any time.

A related, and possibly the most important long-term, effect of the industrial revolution was that the world was at peace for a hundred years between 1815 and 1914.

The picture has been expanded and deepened by recent scholarship showing that exactly this period, 1820–1917, saw the greatest growth of democracy, and democracies, in history, apart from the years after the Second World War.

In the end, haute finance failed to avert the First World War, which in turn would bring about a fundamental change in the banking system of the West. But a watershed was reached in 1815. Before then, governments and merchants had always accepted that wars provided the opportunity to expand trade. After the industrial revolution, with the rise of a prosperous middle class, the economics of war changed for all time. The hundred years peace, as Karl Polanyi called it, allowed the industrial revolution to spark the development of mass society, a totally new form of civilisation.

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John Elliott confirms that the centre of gravity of the Holy Roman Empire shifted decisively in the 1540s and early 1550s away from Germany and the Netherlands to the Iberian peninsula.

But in the middle of the sixteenth century her image abroad suffered grievously from the publication of two works which gave birth to what became known as the ‘Black Legend’. These books were Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, first published in Spain in 1552, which was a frank attempt to reclaim for the Indians a humanity that had been widely denied them, and Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World, published in Venice in 1565.14

The question as to whether America was part of Asia, or a landmass in its own right, was settled in the early 1730s.

In 1728 Bering handed over his commission to another commander and it was two of his men, Ivan Fedorov and Mikhail Grozdev, who finally discovered Alaska in 1732.

In Philadelphia the American Philosophical Society (modelled on the Royal Society of London) was created with the deist Benjamin Franklin as its president from 1769 until his death in1790.29

As their journey progressed, although their creature comforts didn’t improve (one of the steamers they took on the Ohio river struck a reef and sank), Tocqueville’s admiration for America grew and on his return to France he resolved to write a book about the most important feature which he felt distinguished America: democracy. His book appeared in two editions, the first in 1835, which concentrated on politics, and a second, in 1840, which added his thoughts and observations on what we would call the sociological effects of democracy.

The Portuguese policy of secrecy, says Lach, was largely successful for about fifty years, but broke down around mid-century, when it became clear that Portugal could not maintain a monopoly on the spice trade. After about 1550 there was a great vogue for travel literature and it was also about now that the Jesuits began publishing their famous ‘letterbooks’. These provided the most comprehensive description of the Far East for many years.

Other innovations at this time included the Lu xue jing yi (Essence of Music), by Zhu Zaiyu (1536–1611), who was the first person in the world to define the equally tempered scale.

As well as having its own renaissance of sorts, Ming China also had its own Inquisition. This grew out of the resumption of the official civil service competitions–the written examination–from 1646 onwards.25 It happened because, in connection with these examinations, a vast number of private academies proliferated. And, since the dynasty kept a strict control over the curriculum for the examinations, they were able to control much of the thought of the people, and to curtail criticism. In the early eighteenth century this eventually led to more direct control and a device which, like its counterpart in the West, included an index of prohibited books: 10,231 titles were on the list at one point and more than 2,300 were actually destroyed. At the same time, action was taken against dissident authors–forced labour, exile, property confiscated, even execution in some cases.

In 1716 the famous dictionary, the Gang hsi zi dian, appeared–this was to serve as the basis for Western sinologists down to the twentieth century. Altogether, says Jacques Gernet, there was a canon of more than fifty ‘big publications’ in the eighteenth century, codifying Chinese learning and acting as a lively parallel to the enlightenment projects of Western Europe. The traffic in ideas wasn’t all one way of course, and the main influence of the Jesuits in China was in astronomy, cartography and mathematics. In 1702 the scholar Gangshi asked the Jesuit father Antoine Thomas to fix the length of the li as a function of the terrestrial meridian. This innovation was made after the mile but before the kilometre was settled in Europe in the same way.

But if this tolerant approach didn’t satisfy the Vatican, it appealed to the abbé Bignon, the French king’s librarian and the man who reorganised the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris. He requested the missionaries to be alert for Indic manuscripts, which he was keen to obtain to form the backbone of an Oriental library. In 1733, in the Lettres édifiantes, the Jesuits announced their response: the discovery of one of the ‘big game’ of the hunt, a complete Veda, long thought to have been lost.56 (It was in fact a complete Rig Veda in Grantha characters. *)

‘Only after 1771 does the world become truly round; half the intellectual map is no longer blank.’ These are the words of Raymond Schwab, the French scholar, in his book The Oriental Renaissance, a title he took from Edgar Quinet who, in 1841, described the arrival of many Sanskrit manuscripts in Europe in the eighteenth century and compared them with the impact of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

The real start of the Oriental renaissance, however, properly began with the arrival in Calcutta of William Jones and the establishment of the Bengal Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784. This society was established by a group of highly talented English civil servants, employed by the East India Company, who, besides their official day-to-day duties helping to administer the subcontinent, also pursued broader interests, which included language studies, the recovery and translation of the Indian classics, astronomy and the natural sciences.

In 1822 Champollion wrote his famous Letter to M. Dacier, which provided the key to the hieroglyphic script, making use of the trilingual Rosetta Stone, brought back from Egypt, as its key.

His great discovery, the relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, was first aired in his third anniversary address to the Asiatic Society. Each year for eleven years he commemorated the founding of the society with a major address, several of which were important statements on Eastern culture. But his third address, ‘On the Hindus’, delivered on 2 February 1786, was by far the most momentous. He said: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’

comprehensive reorientation in thought. These were the deciphering of Sanskrit in 1785, of Pahlavi in 1793, the cuneiforms in 1803, hieroglyphics in 1822 and Avestan in 1832–‘these were all openings in the long-sealed wall of languages’. One immediate effect of these events was that the study of the Far East was demystified for the first time, moving beyond the conjectural. The Laudian chair of Arabic had been established at Oxford since c. 1640 but Indic and Chinese studies now began in earnest.70 In 1822, the English sent back from Asia to London the sacred books of Tibet and Nepal that were coming to light. The most important of these was the Buddhist canon–one hundred volumes in Tibetan, eighty in Sanskrit–which were discovered and sent west by the English ethnologist Brian Hodgson. It was as a result of the translations of these texts that Western scholars became aware of the similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, as discussed above in Chapter 8. In Germany the philosopher of history Johann Gottfried von Herder was deeply affected by Anquetil’s translation of the Zend Avesta and was moved to render certain verses of Wilkins’ English text of the Bhagavad Gita (translated in 1784) into German. But for Herder his main transformation came when he read a German translation of Jones’ English version of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (1789). Schwab sets out the significance of this as follows: ‘It is well known how Herder, in rekindling for a deciphered India the enthusiasti...

By 1858 Shakuntala was so well-known in France, and so well-regarded, that it became a ballet at the Opéra de Paris, with music by Ernst Reyer and a scenario by Théophile Gautier.

The sheer richness of Sanskrit also went against the Enlightenment belief that languages had begun in poverty and gradually grown more elaborate.76 This brought about a growing realisation that Vico had been right, and that the structure of languages could reveal a great deal about the antiquity of man. In turn, this launched the great age of philology, as it was then called, in the nineteenth century, as grammar was studied as well as vocabulary, to reveal groups of languages–for example, the separation of the Germanic languages from Greek, Latin and Balto Slavic.77 Here the work of Schlegel and Franz Bopp influenced Wilhelm von Humboldt, the minister who helped establish the first chairs in Sanskrit in Germany in 1818.78

Emerson and Thoreau were steeped in Buddhism. One of Emerson’s first poems was called ‘Brahma’, and was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita. His Journals contain many references to Zoroaster, Confucius, the Hindus and the Vedas. On 1 October 1848 he wrote: ‘I owed…a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.’

The very beginning of the romantic movement, the decade of the 1770s, saw the phenomenon of Sturm und Drang, ‘storm and stress’, a young generation of German poets who rebelled against their strict education and social conventions to explore their emotions.54 The best-known of these ‘ill-considered’ works was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).55 Here we have the perfect romantic scenario, in which the individual is set against and is at odds with society. Werther is a young, enthusiastic, passionate individual isolated amid strict, desiccated, pious Lutherans.

They had discovered dance music, with the waltz, in particular, becoming a craze at the time of the Congress of Vienna, in 1814–1815.

The tuba evolved and Adolph Sax invented the saxophone.

At the same time, as orchestras grew in size, there emerged the need for someone to take control. Until then, most ensembles could be controlled either by the first violinist, or whoever was playing the clavier. But after Beethoven, around 1820, the conductor as we know him today emerged.

‘Within one decade, roughly 1830–1840,’ says Harold Schonberg, ‘the entire harmonic vocabulary of music changed. It seemed to come from nowhere, but all of a sudden composers were using seventh, ninth, and even eleventh chords, altered chords and a chromatic as opposed to classical diatonic harmony…the romantics revelled in unusual tone combinations, sophisticated chords, and dissonances that were excruciating to the more conventional minds of the day.’

Verdi was moving toward musical drama, melodrama, in which raw emotion is presented on stage ‘in great primary colours: love, hate, revenge, lust for power’.118 It was led by melody rather than the harmony of the orchestra and so has a humanism that is lacking in Wagner.119 Even so, it was quite different from anything that had gone before, and meant that while his operas were hugely popular with audiences (the doors for the first performance had to be opened four hours in advance, the crush was so great), they received an unprecedented critical onslaught. For one performance of Rigoletto, in New York in 1855, two men tried to take the production to court, to have it banned on grounds that it was too obscene for women to see it.

Verdi’s music–its very grandeur–adds to Shakespeare’s stories, to enable us to see that tragedy can indeed take place, even when there is no tragic hero in an obvious way. In this sense, Verdi’s Falstaff, premiered at La Scala in Milan in February 1893, brings romanticism to a close.

But after a series of adventures, when his creditors pursued him from pillar to post, he eventually produced the five-act Rienzi and this made him famous, as Nabucco had made Verdi famous.125 It was staged at Dresden, which immediately secured the rights to Der fliegende Holländer, after which Wagner was appointed Kapellmeister there. Tannhäuser and Lohengrin followed, which were well received, the latter especially, with its novel blend of woodwind and strings, though he himself had to flee Dresden after he sided with the revolutionaries during the uprising of 1848.126

Wagner’s unique position was revealed most clearly in the last phase of his life when he was saved, appropriately enough, by the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig, a homosexual, was certainly in love with Wagner’s music, and may just have been in love with Wagner himself. In any event, he told the composer that he could do more or less what he wanted in Bavaria and Wagner didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘I am the most German of beings. I am the German spirit. Consider the incomparable magic of my works.’130 Although he was forced into exile for a while, on account of his extravagance and a scandalous foray into politics, his involvement with Ludwig did lead eventually to the culmination of his career and another culmination of romanticism. This was his idea of a festival theatre dedicated to his works alone–Bayreuth, and to the Ring. The first Bayreuth Festival was held in 1876, and it was here that Der Ring des Nibelungen–the fruit of twenty-five years’ work–was first performed.131 For the first festival, some four thousand disciples descended on Bayreuth, along with the emperor of Germany, the emperor and empress of Brazil, seven other royals, and some sixty newspaper correspondents from all over the world, including two from New York who were allowed to use the new transatlantic cable to get their stories published almost immediately.

In May 1798 one of the most extraordinary expeditions in the history of ideas set out from Toulon, in France. No fewer than 167 chemists, engineers, biologists, geologists, architects, painters, poets, musicians and doctors were gathered together, referred to as savants by the 38,000 troops also collected in the southern French port. Like the troops, the savants didn’t know where they were headed, for their young commanding officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, had kept the destination secret. The average age of the savants was twenty-five, the youngest fourteen, but there were also well-known figures among the group which included: Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the flower painter, Gratet de Dolomieu, the geologist after whom the Dolomite mountains are named, and Nicholas Conté, a prominent chemist and naturalist.

Doubly so when a big block of granite was found at Rosetta, where a contingent of soldiers was clearing a piece of land which they intended to turn into fortifications. This stone bore three texts, one in hieroglyphics, one in a demotic, cursive form of Egyptian, and one in Greek. It promised the possibility that hieroglyphics would soon be deciphered. (See Chapter 29 above.)3 One could say that archaeology in the West began with this expedition and that we have Napoleon to thank for it. In fact, in the realm of ideas, we have Napoleon to thank for rather more than this. After his return from Egypt, he went on to mount a campaign against Germany and this too was, indirectly, no less beneficial.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, some two thousand self-governing German-speaking units that had survived the Thirty Years War had been reduced to around three hundred. This was still a lot by the standards of elsewhere but, in 1813, and led by Prussia, the Germans managed at last to defeat Napoleon, in the process learning the virtues of order and respect for rules that was to pay so handsomely thereafter.4 This was an important step on the road to unification, which finally was to arrive in 1871.

However, stung into action by Napoleon’s campaigns, and example, which humiliated many Germans, the Francophile Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who had spent time in Paris prior to the rise of Napoleon, took it upon himself to push through a number of administrative reforms that had a profound effect on German intellectual life. In particular, Humboldt conceived the idea of the modern university, not merely as colleges which trained the clergy, doctors and lawyers–the traditional format–but as places where research was a primary activity. In parallel with this, Humboldt introduced the practice whereby high school teachers in Germany must have a degree in order to teach. This linked the universities to schools much more directly than hitherto and helped spread the ideal of scholarship, based on original research, throughout German-speaking society. The PhD, a higher degree based on original research, was introduced. German intellectual life was transformed and before long the effects were felt across Europe and in north America.5 This was the start of the golden age of German intellectual influence, which was only brought to an end by the ravages of Adolf Hitler following 1933.

The most controversial of all the Germanic textual bombshells was The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in 1835 by David Strauss (1808–1874). Strauss was much influenced by German romanticism–he wrote a romantic tragedy that was performed, and took a great interest in magnetic and hypnotic cures. In this way he acquired an understanding of God as immanent in nature, but not as someone who would intervene in the course of history.15 Strauss thus used history against religion, arguing that its details were insufficient, by a long way, to support Christianity as it existed in the nineteenth century. So incendiary were his findings–that Jesus was not a divine figure, that the miracles never took place, that the church as we know it has little connection with Jesus–that Strauss’s appointment to a professorship in Zurich in 1839 sparked a local riot so worrying to the local authorities that he had to be ‘retired’ before he even had chance to take up his chair. His conclusions could not be retired so easily, however.

Archaeology, a term first used in the 1860s, amplified and deepened the work of philology, going beyond the texts and confirming that there was a more distant past for men, pre-history, from before writing.

In the 1820s, Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphics, as we saw in Chapter 29, and in 1847 Sir Austen Layard excavated Nineveh and Nimrud, in what is now Iraq. There, he uncovered the wonderful palaces of Assurnasirpal II, king of Assyria (885–859 BC) and Sennacherib (704–681 BC).

All that began to change in 1856 when workers started clearing out a small cave in the side of the Neander valley (Neander Thal in German) through which the river Düssel flows into the Rhine. There, a skull was found, buried beneath more than a metre of mud, together with some other bones. The workmen who found the bones passed them to a local friend who, they felt, was educated enough to make something of them, and he passed them on to Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at Bonn University. Schaaffhausen identified the remains as the top part of a skull, two thigh-bones, parts of a left arm, part of a pelvis, and other smaller remains. In the paper he subsequently wrote on the discovery, Schaaffhausen drew attention to the thickness of the bones, the large size of the scars left by the muscles that were attached to them, the pronounced ridges above the eyes, and a low, narrow forehead. Importantly, Schaaffhausen concluded that the bones were not deformed, either because of where they had been kept over the years, or because of some pathological process. ‘Sufficient grounds exist,’ he wrote, ‘for the assumption that man coexisted with the animals found in the diluvium; and many a barbarous race may, before all historical time, have disappeared, together with animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organisation is improved have continued the genus.’

By this time, the word ‘science’ had begun to acquire its modern meaning. (The term ‘scientist’ was coined by William Whewell in 1833.) Until the end of the eighteenth century, the phrases ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘natural history’ had been preferred.