Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

2. See the photograph on page 243 of: J. G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874–1974, London: Macmillan, 1974.

3. Mason (editor), Op. cit., page 162.

4. Crowther, Op. cit., page 48.

5. Steven Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983/1990, page 7.

6. Mason (editor), Op. cit., page 161.

7. Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000, pages 3 and 286. See also: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, page 30.

8. Ibid., page 31.

9. Ibid., pages 41–42.

10. Ibid., pages 38–40.

11. Ibid., pages 50–51 and 83–85.

12. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2003, pages 69ff.

13. Ibid., page 30. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, Op. cit., pages 182–184.

14. Bradbury and McFarlane (editors) Op. cit., page 86; and Arnold Hauser, A Social History of Art, Op. cit., volume IV, page 224. In Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented the concept of the self as a private inner space and in so doing inaugurated the Western tradition of inwardness.

15. Burrow, Op. cit., pages 137–138.

16. Ibid., page 153.

17. Robinson, ‘Symbols at an Exhibition’, Op. cit., page 12.

18. P. B. Medawar, The Hope of Progress, London: Methuen, 1972, page 68.

19. John Maddox, What Remains to Be Discovered, London: Macmillan, 1998, page 306.

20. John Cornwell (editor), Consciousness and Human Identity, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, page vii. See: Simon Blackburn, ‘The world in your head’, New Scientist, 11 September 2004, pages 42–45; and Jeffrey Gray, Consciousness: Creeping Up on the Hard Problem, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Benjamin Libet, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.

21. See, for example, J. R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, London: Granta, 1996, pages 95ff.

22. Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

23. Ibid., page 87.

24. Cornwell (editor), Op. cit., pages 11–12. Laura Spinney, ‘Why we do what we do’, New Scientist, 31 July 2004, pages 32–35; Emily Suiger, ‘They know what you want’, Ibid., page 36.

25. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, New York: Pantheon, 1994, page 321.

26. Olaf Sporns, ‘Biological variability and brain function’, in Cornwell (editor), Op. cit., pages 38–53.

27. John Gray, Straw Dogs, London: Granta, 2002, page 151.

Further Notes

1. Here is something else to bear in mind – that to be influential an idea does not have to be right. The critic Paul Robinson made the same point about Sigmund Freud in the twentieth century: ‘The dominant intellectual presence of our century was, for the most part, wrong.’³⁷

2. There is other evidence that the art of the early Americans also falls into three separate styles.³⁹

3. Boustrophedon means the lines follow the route of a plough: if the first line is right to left, the second is left to right, the third right to left, and so on.

4. A case of ‘suttee’, a widow sacrificing herself following the death of her husband, was reported from northern India in the summer of 2002. An account of the nineteenth-century human sacrifice among the Khonds of Bengal is given in the notes.

5. The English word ‘soul’ is derived from the Germanic saiwalo.

6. See here, for the scholarly disagreements on this subject.

7. The romantic term ‘Silk Road’ was first coined in the 1870s by the German geographer Ferdinand Paul Wilhelm Freiherr von Richthofen, ancestor of the First World War flying ace, the Red Baron.

8. The empiricists in Alexandria had carried out experiments but never developed this as a systematic approach. So too with the Chinese in the Han age and al-Rhazi in ninth-century Baghdad.

9. Among the things at risk in Constantinople was the greatest relic collection of all: the Crown of Thorns, the cloth from Edessa on which Christ imprinted his face, St Luke’s portrait of the Virgin, the hair of John the Baptist.⁴⁸