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

by Peter Watson

The German system was chiefly responsible for what William James called ‘the PhD octopus’. Yale awarded the first PhD west of the Atlantic in 1861; by 1900 well over three hundred were being granted every year.

Between 1866 and 1896 the number of patents issued annually in the United States more than doubled and in the decade from 1879 to 1890 rose from 18,200 to 26,300 a year.

It was in this environment that Elmer Sperry pioneered his gyrocompass and automatic control devices for the navy and in which Hiram Stevens Maxim, in 1885, set up for manufacture, and demonstrated, ‘the world’s most destructive machine gun’. By using the recoil from one cartridge to load and fire the next, the Maxim far surpassed the Gatling gun, which had been invented in1862.

It was the Maxim gun that inflicted a great deal of the horror in colonial territories at the high point of empire.94 It was the German Maxim which inflicted 60,000 casualties at the Somme on 1 July 1916.

The idea of using electricity as a means of signalling had been conceived around 1750 but the first functioning telegraph had been set up by Francis Ronalds, in his garden in Hammersmith in London, in 1816.

While the cables were being laid, many had high hopes that the more speedy communication they would permit would prove an aid to world peace, by keeping statesmen in closer touch with one another. This hope proved vain, but the transatlantic cable, achieved in 1866, made its mark quickly in commercial terms. And, as Gillian Cookson has written in The Cable: The Wire that Changed the World, ‘From this moment began a sense of shared experience, a convergence of cultures, between the two English-speaking nations.’95

When Francis Galton, Darwin’s step-cousin, circulated a questionnaire to 189 Fellows of the Royal Society in 1874, inquiring after their religious affiliation, he was surprised by the answers he received. Seventy per cent described themselves as members of the established churches and while some said that they had no religious affiliation, many others were Nonconformist of one stripe or another–Wesleyan, Catholic, or some other form of organised church.

The atheism of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment was one factor but in Britain, he says, there were two books which did more than any other to undermine faith. These were Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in three instalments between 1776 and 1788, and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years after his death.

It owed a lot, Chadwick says, to John Stuart Mill, who published his essay On Liberty in the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 1859.

In his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Engels reported ‘almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc….’

‘The population of Paris rose by nearly 100 per cent between 1861 and 1905, the number of parishes by about 33 per cent, the number of priests by about 30 per cent.’

The greatest of the popularisers was Ernst Haeckel, a German who in 1862 published The Natural History of Creation. This, a very readable polemic in favour of Darwin, just three years after the Origin and spelling out its implications, went through nine editions by the end of the century and was translated into twelve languages. DieWelträtsel, translated into English in 1900 as The Riddle of the Universe, and which explained the new cosmology, sold 100,000 copies in German and as many in English.41 Haeckel was far more widely read than Darwin, and became for a time equally famous–people flocked to hear him talk.

The other populariser, who did for Strauss what Haeckel did for Darwin, and became just as famous in the process, was Ernest Renan. Originally destined for the priesthood, he lost his faith and put his new conviction into several books, of which the Life of Jesus (1863) was by far the most influential.43 Though he said different things at different times, it seems that it was the study of history that destroyed Renan’s faith, and his book on Jesus had the same effect on others.

In Britain, says Chadwick, it surfaced for the first time in a Saturday Review leader in May 1864, criticising the wilful inability of the Curia in Rome to concede the advances of modern science, in particular Galileo’s discoveries and insights, by then hundreds of years old. In this way, clericalism came to be synonymous with obscurantism and administrative stonewalling and was broadened beyond the Roman Catholic Church to all churches and their opposition to modern thinking, including political thinking.

In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert portrayed a people who were anticlerical most of the time, even though their children were baptised and they continued to receive the last rites from a priest.55 In France, indifference to religion was growing among ordinary people, just as Engels had noted a decade earlier in England.

These ideas were carried to their extreme in the doctrine of papal infallibility, which was declared for the first time by the First Vatican Council in 1870.

The Vatican may have felt that, with the great travel and communications revolutions of the nineteenth century, it would be able to exert its authority more effectively than in the Middle Ages and this may explain why, in addition to papal infallibility, Leo XIII issued Aeterni Patris in 1879 in which he singled out St Thomas Aquinas to be the dominant guide in modern Catholic thought.

The most influential of these were grouped around Civiltà cattolica, a journal created in 1849 at the behest of the pope, as a response to the events of 1848.67 These Thomists (of whom Gioachino Pecci, bishop of Perugia, later Leo XIII, was a leading figure) were implacably opposed to developments in modern thought. Modern ideas should be rejected, they insisted, ‘without exception’.

As if all this were not enough, in 1893 Leo issued Providentissimus Deus, which aimed to contain the new scholarship regarding the Bible. This edict argued, more than thirty years after Darwin, and nearly sixty years after Strauss and Lyell, that ‘a profitable understanding of sacred writings’ could not be achieved by way of the ‘earthly sciences’. Wisdom comes from above, reiterated the edict, and of course on these matters the pope was infallible. The papal document dismissed the charge that the Bible contained forgeries and falsehoods and pointed out that science was ‘so far from the final truth that they [the scientists] are perpetually modifying and supplementing it’.

In 1903, when Pius X ascended the papal throne, he did so believing that ‘the number of enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly’. He said he was convinced that only believers could be ‘on the side of order and have the power to restore calm in the midst of this upheaval’.74 He therefore took it upon himself to continue Leo’s fight against modernism, and with renewed vigour. In Lamentabili, his decree of 1907, he condemned sixty-five specific propositions of modernism, including the biblical criticisms, and reasserted the doctrine of the principle of the mystery of faith. Yet more books were placed on the Index and candidates for higher orders were obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, in a form of words which required their rejection of modernist ideas. Lamentabili reasserted the role of dogma one more time, in the famous phrase: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’

The first book of modern chemistry was published in Turkish in 1848 and the first title of modern biology in 1865.

A civilian school of medicine was founded in Istanbul in 1867 and two years later registration began for the Darülfünân, or university. It opened for classes in 1874–1875, consisting of schools of letters, law and, instead of science, as originally intended, civil engineering (this latter was based on the French École des Ponts et Chaussées).

The Encümen-i Danis (Learned Society), not dissimilar to the Academie Française, was conceived in 1851, a translation council was set up in 1866, the metric system adopted in 1869 and, when Pasteur discovered the rabies vaccine in 1885, the Turks sent a delegation of physicians to Paris to ab...

Al-Afghani’s main message was that European success was basically due to two things, to its science and to its laws, and he said that these were derived from ancient Greece and India. ‘There is no end or limit to science,’ he said, ‘science rules the world.’ (This was in1882.) ‘There was, is, and will be no ruler in the world but science.’ ‘The English have reached Afghanistan; the French have seized Tunisia. In reality, this usurpation, aggression and conquest have not come from the French or the English. Rather it is science that everywhere manifests its greatness and power.’

it was only from about 1860 that Europeans who regarded themselves as Christian could be friendly with non-believers.

The first plays began to appear, in Lebanon in 1847, with an adaptation of a French drama; the first Urdu play was produced in India in 1853 and the first Turkish play was performed in 1859.

Constitutionalist proposals were produced, or passed, in Egypt in 1866, in Tunisia in 1861, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and 1908, in Iran in 1906 and again in 1909. In Afghanistan a modernist movement was suppressed in 1909.81

Sigmund Freud’s views were first set out in Studies in Hysteria, published in 1895 with Joseph Breuer, and then more fully in his work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the last weeks of 1899.

By 1900 there were eleven metropolises–including London, Paris, Berlin and New York–which had more than a million inhabitants, unprecedented concentrations of people.

These latter three owe quite a lot of their prominence to Georg Brandes, a Danish critic who, in 1883, in his book of that title, identified Men of the Modern Breakthrough.50 The ‘modern minds’ that he highlighted included Flaubert, John Stuart Mill, Zola, Tolstoy, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, but above all Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche. Brandes defined the task of modern literature as the synthesis of naturalism and romanticism–of the outer and inner–and cited these three men as supreme examples.

The Ibsen phenomenon burst in Berlin and then spread to Europe. It began in 1887, with Ghosts, which was banned by the police (a perfect modernist/avant-garde occurrence). Closed performances were given and heavily oversubscribed. (The book, however, sold very well and had to be reprinted.51) An Ibsen banquet was held where the ‘dawn of a new age’ was declared. This was followed by an ‘Ibsen Week’, which saw The Lady from the Sea, The Wild Duck and A Doll’s House playing simultaneously. When Ghosts was finally allowed on to the open stage, later that year, it provoked a sensation and was an important influence on James Joyce, among others. Franz Servaes had this to say: ‘Some people, as though inwardly shattered, did not regain their calm for days.

They rushed about the city, about the Tiergarten…’ Ibsen fever raged for two years.52 ‘The most important event ...

Rudin, in Turgenev’s 1856 novel of that name, Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Stavrogin in The Devils (1872), Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) and Levin in Anna Karenina (1877) all attempt to break out of their debilitating self-consciousness via crime, romantic love, religion or revolutionary activity.

But Dostoevsky arguably went furthest, in ‘Notes from Underground’ (1864), where he explores the life–if that is what it is–of a petty official who has come into a small inheritance and is now retired and lives as a recluse. The story is really a discussion of consciousness, of character, selfhood. Although at one stage, the official is described as spiteful, vengeful and malicious, at other times he confesses to the opposite qualities. This inconsistency in personality, in character, is Dostoevsky’s main point. The petty official ends up confessing: ‘The fact is that I have never succeeded in being anything at all.’

The Cavendish Laboratory, in the University of Cambridge, England, is arguably the most distinguished scientific institution in the world. Since it was established in the late nineteenth century it has produced some of the most consequential and innovative advances of all time. These include the discovery of the electron in 1897, the discovery of the isotopes of the light elements (1919), the splitting of the atom (also in 1919), the discovery of the proton (1920), of the neutron (1932), the unravelling of the structure of DNA (1953), and the discovery of pulsars (1967). Since the Nobel Prize was instituted in 1901, more than twenty Cavendish and Cavendish-trained physicists have won the prize for either physics or chemistry.

These explained the nature of light but also led the German physicist Heinrich Hertz at Karlsruhe in 1887 to identify electromagnetic waves, now known as radio.

In the first place, in November 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, at Würzburg, observed that when the cathode rays hit the glass wall of a cathode-ray tube, highly penetrating rays were emitted, which he called X-rays (because x, for a mathematician, signified the unknown). The X-rays caused various metals to fluoresce and, most amazingly, were found to pass through the soft tissue of his hand, to reveal the bones within.

But it was Thomson’s 1897 discovery which capped everything, produced the first of the Cavendish’s great successes and gave modern physics its lift-off, into arguably the most exciting and important intellectual adventure of the modern world. In a series of experiments J. J. pumped different gases into the glass tubes, passed an electric current, and then surrounded them either with electrical fields or with magnets. As a result of this systematic manipulation of conditions, Thomson convincingly demonstrated that cathode ‘rays’ were in fact infinitesimally minute particles erupting from the cathode and drawn to the anode. Thomson further found that the particles’ trajectory could be altered by an electric field and that a magnetic field shaped them into a curve.10 More important still, he found that the particles were lighter than hydrogen atoms, the smallest known unit of matter, and exactly the same whatever the gas through which the discharge passed. Thomson had clearly identified something fundamental–this was in fact the first experimental establishment of the particulate theory of matter.

One of the most poignant moments in the history of ideas surely came in the middle of the eleventh century. In 1065 or 1067 the Nizamiyah was founded in Baghdad (see above, page 274). This was a theological seminary and its establishment brought to an end the great intellectual openness in Arabic/Islamic scholarship, which had flourished for two to three hundred years. Barely twenty years later, in 1087, Irnerius began teaching law at Bologna and the great European scholarship movement was begun. As one culture ran down, another began to find its feet. The fashioning of Europe was the greatest turning-point in the history of ideas.

The very latest evidence traces the first Americans to the Jomon culture in Japan.

It should not be overlooked that his immediate predecessor, Galerius, had issued an edict of toleration in 311 on his deathbed. Many consider this, rather than the conversion of Constantine, the turning-point in religious history.

In 988, al-Nadim composed al-Fihrist, a sort of compendium of books then available in this city and this gives some idea of the range of ideas and activities then current. He refers to manuscripts devoted to such subjects as hypnotism, sword-swallowing, glass-chewing and juggling. But there were more serious subjects too.

The translation of Greek, Persian and Indian authors was encouraged by the introduction of paper. This was a Chinese invention, probably from the first century AD. According to tradition, paper reached the Middle East in 751 after the Arabs had captured some Chinese prisoners at the battle of Talas (in modern Kyrgystan, 150 miles north-east of Tashkent). On this account, the prisoners taught their conquerors how to manufacture the new product and their lives were spared. This is now thought unlikely, however, as it appears that Chinese painters, weavers and goldsmiths were living in Kufa, in southern Iraq, at the time of the Arab conquest. Almost certainly they were familiar with papermaking as well. But it doesn’t change the point that this was another important idea/invention that flourished in Baghdad having come from outside. The ancient Arabic word for paper, kaghdad, is derived from Chinese. In Baghdad, there was an area of the city known as the Suq al-warraqin, the Stationer’s Market: lining its streets were more than a hundred shops selling paper. Baghdad was an important centre of papermaking and, for the Byzantines at least, it was the best. They referred to paper as bagdatixon and the standard size, 73 cm × 110 cm, was known as a ‘Baghdadi sheet’. There were many different types, usually named after rulers: Talhi paper, Nui paper, Tahiri paper. Paper was the new technology and the Arabs were the masters. Jonathan Bloom,

The wheelbarrow (the ‘wooden ox’), by means of which loads of 300 lb could be carried along narrow, winding paths, was invented in the third century.

Gunpowder was in fact only one of several advances in military techniques which were to have a marked effect on world history. The Chinese also perfected a selection technique for its forces–giving recruits a series of tests (shooting ability, eyesight) and assigning them to specialised units on that basis. New weapons were invented, including repeating crossbows, a type of tank, and a paraffin flame-thrower operated by a piston to ensure a continuous jet of flame. A treatise on military matters, General Principles of the Classicon War (Wujinzong yao), discussed new theories about siege warfare. Gernet, Op. cit., page 310. Published in 1044, this treatise also contains the first mention of the formula for gunpowder (the first reference in Europe is by Roger Bacon, in 1267).

In 1900, a Daoist known as Wang took up residence at the site of the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, at Dunhuang in Gansu, an important monastic centre along the Silk Road. In the course of Wang’s exploration he noticed a gap in the plaster of one of the caves and, when he tapped it, he found it was hollow behind. This was how he discovered the so-called Library Cave, which contained 13,500 paper scrolls, from which daily life in eighth-century Dunhuang has since been recreated. These scrolls show that, in a town of 15,000, there were thirteen monasteries and that one in ten of the population was directly linked to these establishments, either as monks or nuns or as workpeople.

Charlemagne was subjected to a bizarre–but revealing–encounter in Rome in800. The pope of the time, Leo III, was unsuccessful and unpopular. So unpopular that he had been beaten up by a Roman mob, charged with ‘moral turpitude’ and forced to seek Charlemagne’s protection. When the emperor arrived in Rome for the trial of Leo, when he purged himself of the charges against him, Charlemagne went to visit the tomb of St Peter, on Christmas day 800, to pray. As he rose from his prayers, Leo suddenly stepped forward and placed the crown on the king’s head. This was a crude attempt to reassert the right of the papacy to award the imperial title and Charlemagne was not at all pleased–he said he would never have entered the church had he known what the pope intended.

The First Crusade was fortunate in its timing. Emotions among Christians still ran high. The millennium–AD 1000, as it then was–was not long over, and the millennium of the Passion, 1033, closer still. In addition, because of a temporary disunity among the Arabs, which weakened their ability to resist the five thousand or so who comprised the Christian forces, the crusaders reached Jerusalem relatively intact and, after a siege lasting well over a month, took it. In the process they massacred all Muslim and Jewish residents, the latter being burned in their chief synagogue.

Jews offered a different but allied problem. There was a large and prosperous Jewish community in the south of France–Cathar territory–and, as we have seen, there may well have been Jewish ideas mixed up in the genealogy of Catharism. So although Innocent forbade attempts to convert Jews by force, he did advocate ghettoisation–physical separation–which not only limited contact but implied that they were social pariahs. It was at the Fourth Lateran Council, held towards the end of Innocent’s papacy in 1215, that it was decreed the Jews should wear a yellow patch ‘so they could be easily distinguished as outcasts’.

‘The earliest European college about which there is information,’ says Alan Cobban, ‘is the Collège des Dix-Huit which had its beginnings in Paris in 1180, when a certain Jocius de Londoniis bought the room he had in the Hospital of the Blessed Mary of Paris and endowed it for the perpetual use of eighteen poor clerks.’