Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

For some reason, numerous figures in the past have viewed intellectual history as a tripartite system – organised around three grand ideas, ages or principles. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) argued – heretically – that there have been three epochs, presided over by God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit respectively, during which the Old Testament, the New Testament and a ‘spiritual eternal Gospel’ will be in force.⁸ Jean Bodin (c. 1530–1596), the French political philosopher, divided history into three periods – the history of Oriental peoples, the history of Mediterranean peoples, and the history of northern peoples.⁹ In 1620 Francis Bacon identified three discoveries that set his age apart from ancient times.¹⁰ ‘It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world, the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.’¹¹ The origins of each of these discoveries have been identified since Bacon’s time but that does not change the force of his arguments.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Bacon’s amanuensis, argued that three branches of knowledge outweighed all others in explanatory power: physics, which studies natural objects; psychology, which studies man as an individual; and politics, which deals with artificial and social groupings of mankind. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) distinguished the age of the gods, the heroic age and the human age (though he borrowed some of these ideas from Herodotus and Varro). In fact, Vico tended to think in threes: he distinguished three ‘instincts’ which, he said, shaped history, and three ‘punishments’ that shaped civilisation.¹² The three instincts were a belief in Providence, the recognition of parenthood, and the instinct to bury the dead, which gave mankind the institutions of religion, family and sepulture.¹³ The three punishments were shame, curiosity and the need to work.¹⁴ The French statesman Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) argued that civilisation is the product of geographical, biological and psychological factors (Saint-Simon agreed). Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who thought that the French Revolution was the dividing line between the past and a ‘glorious future’, believed there were three outstanding issues in history – the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within one and the same nation, and the perfecting of mankind. William Godwin (1756–1836), the English anarchist, thought that the three chief ideas that would produce the all-important goal in life – the triumph of reason and truth – were literature, education and (political) justice. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) noted ‘the three greatest elements of modern civilisation [are] gunpowder, printing and the Protestant religion’, while Auguste Comte (1798–1857) idealised three stages of history – theological, metaphysical and scientific, later expanded to theological-military, metaphysical-legalistic, and scientific-industrial.¹⁵ Later still in the nineteenth century the anthropologist Sir James Frazer distinguished the ages of magic, religion and science, while Lewis Morgan, in his Ancient Society, divided history into the stages of savagery, barbarism and civilisation, and thought that the main organising ideas of civilisation were the growth of government, the growth of ideas about the family, and the growth of ideas about property.

Not everyone has fallen into this tripartite way of looking at history. Condorcet thought there had been ten stages of progress, Johann Gottfried Herder divided history into five periods, Georg Wilhelm Hegel divided it into four, and Immanuel Kant believed that progress had gone through nine stages.