Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

early eighteenth century AD: rise of newspapers; learned journals and concert halls proliferate – emergence of the ‘public sphere’; Index of Prohibited Books in China

1721 AD: first factory, in Derby

1729 AD: electricity transmitted over distance

1740s AD: David Hume attacks Christianity

after 1750 AD: the Great Awakening in America

1760 AD: Industrial Revolution begins

1789 AD: French Revolution, Declaration of the Rights of Man, in France; Bentham, ‘felicific calculus’

1790 AD: the term ‘middle classes’ first used

late eighteenth century AD: textual criticism of the Bible begins at Göttingen; vulcanism and neptunism – rival theories of the history of the earth

1805 AD: Beethoven, Eroica symphony

1816 AD: first functioning telegraph; the term ‘Hindoo’ first used (hitherto ‘Gentoo’)

1831 AD: British Association for the Advancement of Science formed

after 1833AD: the terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘psychiatric’ introduced

1838 AD: Comte coins the term ‘sociology’, the term ‘palaeontology’ first used

1840 AD: Louis Agassiz identifies the ice age

1848 AD: revolution in several European cities; Robert Owen shows vertebrates have a similar structure

1856 AD: Neanderthal skull discovered in Germany

1859 AD: Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, identifies natural selection as the mechanism by means of which evolution proceeds; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

1864, 1879, 1893 and 1899 AD: papal edicts against modernism, biblical criticism and science

1874 AD: Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, opened

1880 AD: Jacob Breuer treats Bertha Pappenheim (‘Anna O’)

1885 AD: Pasteur discovers rabies vaccine

1897 AD: discovery of the electron – founding of particle physics; Emile Durkheim, Suicide

1899–1900 AD: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, lays the foundations of psychoanalysis

Introduction

The Most Important Ideas in History: Some Candidates

In 1936, a collection of papers by Sir Isaac Newton, the British physicist and natural philosopher, which had been considered to be ‘of no scientific value’ when offered to Cambridge University some fifty years earlier, came up for auction at Sotheby’s, the international salesroom, in London. The papers were bought by another Cambridge man, the distinguished economist John Maynard Keynes (later Lord Keynes). He spent several years studying the documents – mainly manuscripts and notebooks – and in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, delivered a lecture to the Royal Society Club in London in which he presented an entirely new view of ‘history’s most renowned and exalted scientist’. ‘In the eighteenth century and since,’ Keynes told the club, ‘Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.’¹

Newton is still known to us, first and foremost, as the man who conceived the modern notion of the universe, as held together by gravity. But, in the decades since Keynes spoke to the Royal Society, a second – and very different – Newton has emerged: a man who spent years involved in the shadowy world of alchemy, in the occult search for the philosopher’s stone, who studied the chronology of the Bible because he believed it would help predict the apocalypse that was to come. He was a near-mystic who was fascinated by Rosicrucianism, astrology and numerology. Newton believed that Moses was well aware of the heliocentric theory of Copernicus and his own doctrine of gravity. A generation after the appearance of his famous book Principia Mathematica, Newton was still striving to uncover the exact plan of Solomon’s Temple, which he considered ‘the best guide to the topography of heaven’.² Perhaps most surprising of all, the latest scholarship suggests that Newton’s world-changing discoveries in science might never have been made but for his researches in alchemy.³