The literary ethic was not only expressed in what we normally think of as literature. It became the ethic of the historian, illuminating works like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It became the ethic of the philosopher, informing the ideas of Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche. And, crucially, it became the ethic of the scientist. One could argue that the single most influential literary work of the nineteenth century was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In the twentieth century, the literary ethic ran through such diverse books as Einstein’s Relativity, Keynes’s General
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