Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

10. ‘Holy John, remove the sin from our unclean lips so that we, thy servants, can give free expression to our innermost feelings and praise thy wondrous actions.’¹⁰³

11. A nautical mile, one minute of the great circle of the earth, is equal to 2,025 yards, roughly 15 per cent greater than a statute mile, 1,760 yards.

12. The principle of logarithms may be illustrated by the following simple sum: 100 (10²) × 1000 (10³) = 100,000 (10⁵). It is much easier and quicker to add the ² and the ³ to equal ⁵ than to do the whole calculation.

13. Newton himself, who was an Arian – that is, he did not believe in the divinity of Christ – thought that God was ‘immanent’ in space and time, existing everywhere, and that matter alone had been created. This was in effect a return to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation.⁷²

14. In The Book of J, David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (1990) argue that the author of J may well have been a woman of the royal house living at King Solomon’s court (although the latest Israeli scholarship throws doubt on the very existence of Solomon: see Chapter 7).⁸⁰

15. This was in itself a step leading towards the discovery of the pressure of the atmosphere.

16. John Elliott questions whether Baroque art, heavily dependent on gold and silver ornamentation, would have been possible without the riches of the New World.⁶

17. See here, for a discussion of the Indian alphabets.

18. Edward Said’s controversial views about Western attitudes to ‘the Orient’ are considered in Chapter 33, below.

19. Some of these paragraphs are an elaboration of discussion in the author’s previous book, A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind.

20. Again, these paragraphs are based, in part, on material which appeared in the author’s A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind.

21. It was called electricity after the Greek word ηλεκτρον, elektron, which means amber. In ancient Greece it had been first observed that amber, when rubbed, attracts all articles towards it.

22. They are, however, discussed fully in the present author’s A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind.

23. In a sense, the gene has developed properties of the soul in the contemporary world. I mean this in the sense that it is a hidden, indestructible substance, which to an extent governs our nature irrespective of what we consciously might wish for ourselves. A gene is not a soul, but many people seem to regard it as such.

Indexes

NAMES AND PLACES

Abbeville (France) ref 1, ref 2

Abd al-Malik ref 1, ref 2

Abd-al-Wahhab, Muhammad bin ref 1

Abduh, Muhammad ref 1

Abelard, Peter ref 1

Sic et Non (Yes and No) ref 1, ref 2

Abulfazl: Akbar-Namah (Book of Akbar, The) ref 1

Abu Bakr ref 1, ref 2

Abu-Lughod, Janet ref 1

Before European Hegemony: the World System AD 1250 ref 1, ref 2

Academy (Athens) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Acosta, José de ref 1, ref 2

Acropolis (Athens) ref 1

Adams, John Quincy ref 1, ref 2

Adler, Alfred ref 1

Adso: Letter on the Antichrist ref 1

Aeschylus ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Persians, The ref 1, ref 2

Supplicants, The ref 1

Agassiz, Louis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Agia Sophia (Constantinople) ref 1

Agricola, Georgius ref 1, ref 2

Ailly, Pierre d’: Imago Mundi ref 1

Akbar ref 1

Al Khwarizmi, Muhammad ibn-Musa ref 1, ref 2

De numero indorum (Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning) ref 1

Logical Necessities in Mixed Equations ref 1

Alberti, Leon Battista ref 1

Della famiglia ref 1, ref 2

On Painting ref 1

Albertus Magnus ref 1, ref 2

Al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn-Isma’il ref 1

Aldus Manutius ref 1, ref 2

Alexander of Myndus: Collection of Wonders ref 1

Alexander of Villedieu ref 1

Alexander the Great ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Alexandria ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8

Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr Muhammad ref 1, ref 2

Ihsa al-ulum (De Scientiis) ref 1

Alfonso X of Castile ref 1

Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad: Ihya ’ulum al-din (Revivification of the Sciences of Religion) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Al-Kindi ref 1, ref 2

Al-Kufah ref 1, ref 2

Al-Mazzam ref 1

Altschule, Mark D: Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior (1977) ref 1

Ammonius Saccas ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Anaximander ref 1, ref 2

Anaximenes ref 1, ref 2