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

by Peter Watson

Hutton first published his theories in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, followed by the two-volume Theory of the Earth in 1795, ‘the earliest treatise which can be considered a geological synthesis rather than an imaginative exercise’.

In addition, by the 1830s the cooling earth theory was gaining coherence as an explanation as to why geological activity was greater in the past than now, further fuelling the view that the earth developed, and that life forms had been very different in the past. In 1824 Buckland himself described the first known dinosaur, the gigantic Megalosaurus, though the word ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1841, by the great anatomist Richard Owen.

The Palaeozoic period would eventually be shown to have extended from roughly 550 million years ago to 250 million years ago, and during that time plant life had moved out of the oceans on to land, fish appeared, then amphibians and then reptiles had reached land. These new forms of life were all wiped out, about 250 million years ago, for reasons that are still hard to fathom.

It was von Baer who also showed that the organisation of life forms is not a ‘man-centred hierarchy’, that the human form is just one end-result among many. Robert Owen in his Archetypes and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848) and On the Nature of Limbs (1849) showed that vertebrates have a basically similar structure, which are adapted in different ways but are not ‘aimed’ in a linear way at man.

In 1830 he published the first volume of what would turn into his three-volume Principles of Geology. Lyell’s argument was contained in the subtitle, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation.

The most immediate response to the Bridgewater Treatises was Charles Babbage’s unofficial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, published in 1838, which argued that a creator could work as he himself had worked in creating his famous ‘calculating engine’, a forerunner of the computer, in which, he noted, he could programme his machine to change its operations according to some pre-determined plan.

It was by now difficult to contradict the evidence of the rocks, where the basic picture was clear. ‘The earliest rocks [600 million years ago] yielded only the remains of invertebrates, with the first fish appearing only in the Silurian [440–410 million years ago]. The Mesozoic [250–65 million years ago] was dominated by the reptiles, including the dinosaurs. Although present in small numbers in the Mesozoic, the mammals only became dominant in the Cenozoic [65 million years ago the present], gradually progressing to the more advanced creatures of today, including the human species.’69 (The dates in square brackets were not, of course, accepted in the nineteenth century.) It was hard for people not to read some sort of ‘end’ in this progression, ‘leading’, via stages, to humans, ‘and thus revealing a divine plan with a symbolic purpose’. In books of the time, most ‘trees of life’ showed a main stem, thicker than others, leading directly to man.

None of the foregoing, however, should be allowed to cloud the fact that when On the Origin of Species did appear, in 1859, it introduced ‘an entirely new and–to Darwin’s contemporaries–an entirely unexpected approach to the question of biological evolution’. Darwin’s theory explained, as no one else had done, a new mechanism of change in the biological world.

When the book was published, on 24 November 1859, 1,250 copies were snapped up on the first day.

It did not take long and it is not hard to see why: Ernst Mayr concluded that there were six major philosophical implications of Darwin’s theories: (1) the replacement of a static by an evolving world; (2) the demonstration of the implausibility of creationism; (3) the refutation of cosmic teleology (the idea that there was a purpose in the universe); (4) the abolition of any justification for absolute anthropocentrism (that the purpose of the world is the production of man); (5) the explanation of ‘design’ in the world by purely materialistic processes; (6) the replacement of essentialism by population thinking.

Ernst Mayr says the selection aspect of Darwin’s theory was not finally accepted until the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s.

There was no account of the actual mechanisms by which inherited characteristics were passed on (‘hard heredity’). These were discovered by the monk Gregor Mendel in Moravia in 1865, but Darwin and everyone else missed their significance and they were not rediscovered and given general circulation until 1900.

The men who finally showed that all plants and animals were made up of cells were J. J. Schleiden (plants, 1838) and Theodor Schwann (animals, 1839).

He was also a pacifist and, motivated by humanitarian concerns, in December 1789 he introduced into the Assembly six propositions aimed at creating a new and more humane penal code, one which treated all men the same and did not distinguish, in the penalties imposed, between different ranks. The second article of this new code recommended that capital punishment should henceforth consist of decapitation by means of a new and simple mechanism. The Assembly spent time examining Dr Guillotin’s recommendations, before adopting them, and during the debates a journalist asked–sarcastically and rhetorically, for the new mechanism had not yet been designed, let alone built–‘Should this device bear the name of Guillotin or Mirabeau?’ Guillotin did not either design or build the instrument that did, indeed, come to bear his name. The designer was another doctor, Antoine Louis (at one stage the plan was to call the new device a ‘Louisette’), while the man who actually constructed the execution machine was a Monsieur Guedon or Guidon, the carpenter who normally provided the state with scaffolds.

The guillotine was first used ‘in anger’, so to speak, a week later, on 25 April 1792, when the thief and assassin Jacques Nicholas Pelletier met his end.1 Thousands flocked to see the new instrument but many were disappointed–the execution was over so quickly.

The French Revolution of 1789 is remembered first and foremost for what Hegel called its ‘shrieking aftermath’, five years of bloody terror, lynchings and massacres, and for years of tumultuous political upheaval, culminating eventually in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte and unleashing twenty years of war. The roll call of people sent to the guillotine, often for the flimsiest of reasons, still has the power to shock: Antoine Lavoisier, the chemist, because he was a former tax-gatherer; André Chénier, the poet, because of an editorial someone didn’t like; Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, denounced by Robespierre; Robespierre himself, along with 2,500 others. Robespierre’s loyal follower Philippe Le Blas blew his brains out but even so was taken to the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) and beheaded all the same. People spoke of ‘guillotinemania’ and of ‘the red mass’ being celebrated by ‘worshippers of the scaffold’.

The survey led to the first international scientific conference, in 1799, to consider collaboratively the evidence produced by Delambre and Méchain and to decide on the definitive length. Ironically, the survey produced a set of errors which, because of their importance, formed an important stage on the way to the invention of sophisticated statistics, which are discussed later in this chapter.6 The length the two men calculated for the circumference of the earth differs from modern-day satellite surveys by less than eight pages of this book.

Between 1801 and 1851 the population of England and Wales more or less doubled, from 10.5 million to 20.8 million, but in the cities the increase was out of all proportion. Birmingham went from 71,000 to 233,000, up by 328 per cent, Glasgow jumped from 84,000 to 329,000 (392 per cent), and Manchester/Salford from 95,000 to 401,000, a staggering rise of 422 per cent.

Spencer was more popular than Comte, certainly in Britain and America, where his most famous book, The Study of Sociology (1873), was published both between hard covers and as a series in the press. One reason for his popularity was that he told the Victorian middle classes what they wanted to hear: that individual moral effort is the motor of change, and that therefore sociology supported ideas of laissez-faire economics and minimum government intervention in industry, health and welfare.

Within sociology, Weber was a polymath. To begin with he wrote economic history, then made a survey of the agricultural depression in Prussia in the 1880s, before turning to a different aspect of history, the ancient religions of Israel, India and China, which provided him with a comparative perspective for (modern) Western economic development.32 This gave an added authority to his best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which appeared in 1904.

In 1894 Simmel became the first person to teach a course specifically called sociology.

But social medicine, epidemiology, was also born in the great industrial cities as people struggled to cope with unprecedented problems and experiences, not least in regard to hygiene. One of the first in Britain, who scored a notable early success, and acted as a model for others, was Sir John Snow, who took a statistical/sociological approach to cholera. In 1854, there was in London a terrible outbreak of cholera which had caused over five hundred deaths in fewer than ten days. In going through the lists of deceased and afflicted persons, Snow noted that most cases had occurred in the neighbourhood of Broad Street. ‘Upon interviewing members of the families of the deceased, Snow was able to isolate a single common factor, namely the Broad Street [water] pump, from which victims had drunk in every case. Corroborating evidence was made from the observation that in the local workhouse, also in the Broad Street area, only a few inmates had contracted cholera and that in every case they had contracted it before being admitted to the workhouse. Snow hypothesised (and found) that the workhouse drew water from a separate well…The pay-off for Snow’s careful investigation occurred when, finally convinced that impure water from the Broad Street pump was the cause of the cholera, Snow appealed to the authorities to have the pump closed.’ This brought the outbreak to an end.

The germ theory of disease did not emerge fully until the 1880s. At much the same time that Snow made his deductions, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian, observed that cases of childbed fever could be reduced by having surgeons wash their hands between deliveries. Joseph Lister went further in 1865, advocating the use of carbolic acid (phenol) on patients’ wounds during surgery.

The problems of urbanisation also prompted the British to establish a decennial census, beginning in 1851.

The census reflected a growth of interest in statistics. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, itself a new organisation, founded in 1831, established a statistical section in the same year. The Manchester Statistical Society was founded two years later, and the London Society a year after that.

This regular distribution was found to apply to a number of other phenomena and so the phrase was changed to ‘standard distribution’ (about a mean). The idea was further refined in the 1890s by the English mathematician Karl Pearson (1857–1936), who introduced the term ‘normal distribution curve’, what became known as the bell(-shaped) curve. And this was, perhaps, the most influential idea of all, at least at that time, because the bell-shaped curve was used by Quetelet to produce what he called l’homme moyen, the average man.

‘Statistics therefore appeared to be the means by which the study of social facts is made as objective and as precise as the study of physical facts, and the means by which social science, like physical science, uncovers general laws.’ Such ideas provided hope for those who believed that ‘the competitive system…must be reconstructed for the general welfare’, that there should be state intervention to cushion at least some of the damage inflicted by raw industrialism.53 This was one of the core beliefs of the Fabian Society, founded in London in 1883–1884, and of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where sociology was taught from 1903.54

In 1648, more than 150 years after the discovery of the Indies, and of America, the Treaty of Westphalia was finally concluded. This brought to an end the Thirty Years War, when Protestant and Catholic nations had fought themselves to a standstill over how to interpret God’s intentions.

Modern slavery was not like that: the very idea of the slave trade was itself degrading and horrendous. ‘It began on the morning of 8 August 1444 when the first cargo of 235 Africans, taken from what is now Senegal, was put ashore at the Portuguese port of Lagos.

And Europe’s taste for sugar turned out to be such that, between 1492 and 1820, according to Anthony Pagden, ‘five or six times as many Africans went to America as did white Europeans’.

In the early years of the trade, there were some attempts by Catholic clerics and jurists to claim that the wars deep inside Africa were ‘just’ but few took their arguments seriously and an advance of sorts was made in 1686 when the Holy Office condemned the slave trade. But, significantly, it did not condemn slavery itself.

In the event, it was Denmark which, in 1792, became the first European nation to outlaw the slave trade. Britain took action to end the trade in 1805 and slaving had become a hanging offence by 1824. But elsewhere it went on for another half-century–the last landing was made in Cuba in 1870.17

(The Marseillaise was adopted as the national anthem in 1879.)

In 1886 Edouard Drumont published La France juive, a ‘concoction’ of Jewish life and customs, which, though crude and clumsy, became an instant best-seller. It turned out to be the prelude to a wave of anti-Semitism in that country, culminating in the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of being a German spy. In Germany, the so-called Kulturkampf, the ‘cultural battle’, though it was waged over the supervision of schools and the appointment of parish priests, was really about the attempt by the Protestant state to make Catholic politicians conform to Prussian policy. In amongst this intolerance, the role of Jews was inevitably discussed.

Anyone who doubts this claim–that the period 1848–1933 was the German century–need only consult the list of names which follows. One could start almost anywhere, so complete was this dominance, but let’s begin with music: Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Honegger, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Franz Lehár, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic. Medicine and psychology were not far behind–in addition to Freud, think of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Rorschach, Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Ernst Kretschmer, Géza Roheim, Jacob Breuer, Richard Krafft-Ebing, Paul Ehrlich, Robert Koch, Wagner von Jauregg, August von Wassermann, Gregor Mendel, Erich Tschermak, Paul Corremans. In painting there was Max Liebermann, Paul Klee, Max Pechstein, Max Klinger, Gustav Klimt, Franz Marc, Lovis Corinth, Hans Arp, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Slevogt, Max Ernst, Leon Feininger, Max Beckmann, Alex Jawlensky; Wassily Kandinsky was of Russian birth but it was in Munich that he achieved the single most important breakthrough in modern art–abstraction. In philosophy, in addition to Nietzsche, there was Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Franz Brentano, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Haeckel, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf ...

All of the above writers played a role in this, but the most direct progenitor, the real father, was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). In an article published in 1904 (in the American Journal of Sociology), he argued that the essence of eugenics was that ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ could be objectively described and measured.

But the early colonialists could just not conceive of a people without a religion as they understood the term, and it was they who attached to this complex system of beliefs the phrase ‘the religion of the Gentoos’.80 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Gentoo’ was changed to ‘Hindoo’ and then, in 1816, according to King, Rammohan Roy, an Indian intellectual, employed the word ‘Hinduism’ for the first time.

‘It was by no means certain,’ says King, ‘that the Tibetans, Sinhalese and the Chinese conceived of themselves as Buddhists before they were so labelled by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’82 In this case, the crucial figure was Eugène Burnouf, whose Introduction à l’histoire de Bouddhisme indien effectively created the religion as we recognise it today. Published in 1844, Burnouf’s book was based on 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal in 1824 by Brian Hodgson

In 1955, near the end of the colonial period, Zambia had a GDP that was a seventh that of Great Britain; in 2003, after some forty years of independence, it was a twenty-eighth.

Of all the people who shared in the scramble for empire, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the dark continents of ‘overflowing riches’. After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche and Nordau to explore the great fault-line between scientific, liberal and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature.

And Richard is the first recorded monarch using only English since the Conquest. In 1399, when Henry, Duke of Lancaster, crowned himself, after deposing Richard II, he too spoke in what the official history calls his ‘mother tongue’, English.121 ‘In the name of Fadir, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster challenge this reyme of Yngland and the corone with all the members and the appurtenances, als I that am disendit be right lyne of the blode comying fro the gude lorde Kyng Henry Therde…’

The Enlightenment and the industrial revolution naturally introduced yet more new words–reservoir, condenser, sodium (1807), Centigrade (1812), biology (1819), kleptomania (1830), palaeontology (1838), gynaecology and bacterium (both 1847), claustrophobia (1879).

Louisiana was purchased from the French in 1803.

Until 1826 there were just the two universities in existence in England–Oxford and Cambridge–and offering a very restricted range of education.

This became a bone of contention, which culminated in May 1852 in a series of five lectures given in Dublin by John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, on ‘The Idea of the University’. The immediate spur to Newman’s lectures was the founding of the new universities, like the University of London, and the Queen’s Colleges in Ireland (Belfast, Cork and Galway), in which the study of theology was excluded on principle.

Beyond that, most of the colleges that became well-known universities were founded by New Light clergy–New Jersey (Princeton), 1746, Brown, 1764, Queen’s (Rutgers), 1766, and Dartmouth, 1769. ‘New Light’ was a religious response in America to the Enlightenment. Yale had been founded in 1701 as a response to a perceived decline in theological orthodoxy at Harvard.

Such thinking culminated in the famous Yale Report of 1828, which argued that the human personality was made up of various faculties of which reason and conscience were the highest, and that these must be kept in balance. So the goal of education was ‘to maintain such a proportion between the different branches of literature and science, as to form in the student a proper balance of character’.86 The report then went on to argue that the classics should form the core of this balanced character-building.

The University of Illinois was founded in 1868 and California in 1869.

This was nowhere more evident than at Harvard. It had begun as a Puritan college in1636. More than thirty partners of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were graduates of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and so the college they established near Boston naturally followed the Emmanuel pattern.

The man who first conceived the modern university as we know it was Charles Eliot, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, in 1869, at the age of only thirty-five, was appointed President of Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate. When Eliot arrived, Harvard had 1,050 students and fifty-nine members of the faculty. In 1909, when he retired, there were four times as many students and the faculty had grown ten-fold.