The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Later the development of the New World opened up a vast market for European goods and a vast area for Europe’s surplus population. This is the secret of Europe’s rapid growth in wealth and power, and its conquest of Africa and Asia and Australia. And all the history of America, with its experiments in popular sovereignty and popular education (would that the order had been reversed), lay potential in that magnificent adventure of 1492.

11. 1769—JAMES Watt BRINGS THE STEAM ENGINETO PRACTICAL UTILITY This event inaugurated the Industrial Revolution. Hero of Alexandria made a steam engine in 130 B.C.; Della Porta, Savery, and Newcomen had made better ones in 1601, 1698, and 1705; but it was Watt’s stone that capped the arch and changed the world.

Essentially there are only two fundamental and pivotal events in human history: the Agricultural Revolution, in which men passed from hunting to tillage and settled down to build homes, schools, and civilization; and the Industrial Revolution, which threw millions and millions of men, first in England, then in America and Germany, then in Italy and France, then in far away Japan, now in China, the Soviet Union, and India, out of their homes and their farms into cities and factories. It transformed society and government by empowering the owners of machinery and the controllers of commerce beyond the owners of titles and land. It transformed religion by generating science and its persuasive miracles and inducing many men to think in terms of cause and effect and machines. It transformed the mind by substituting novel and varied stimuli, necessitating thought, for the old ancestral and domestic situations to which instinct had been adapted and sufficient. It transformed woman by taking her work from the home and forcing her into the factories to recapture it. It transformed morals by complicating economic life, postponing marriage, multiplying contacts and opportunities, liberating woman, reducing the family, and weakening religious and parental authority and control. And it transformed art by subordinating beauty to use, and subjecting the artist, not to a favored few with inherited standards of judgment and trained tastes, but to a multitude who judged all things in terms of power and cost and size.

All this, incredible as it may seem, is in that single invention of James Watt. All this and more—Capitalism, Socialism, the Imperialism that must come when industrialized nations need foreign markets and foreign food, the wars that must come for these markets, and the revolutions that must come from these wars. Even the Great War, and the vast experiment in Russia, were corollaries of the Industrial Revolution. Seventeen-sixty-nine stands for the whole modern age.

12. 1789—THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The French Revolution must be taken not as a single self-contained event, but as the political signature to economic and psychological facts that had accumulated for centuries. Perhaps it began in 1543, when Copernicus published his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs; for then began the twilight of the gods and the liberation of man. Cast here upon this petty earth, no longer the center of things but an incident, forced to realize that humanity is an interlude in biology, biology an interlude in geology (as any earthquake will remind us), and geology an interlude in astronomy, man was left to shift and think for himself. Thought became free and boundless and fought its way out of superstition and ecclesiasticism to the time when a whole age would be named after a writer, and Voltaire might say, “I have no scepter, but I have a pen.”

I never cease admiring the French Enlightenment; all in all I consider it the peak of human history, greater even than Periclean Greece, or Augustan Rome, or Medicean Italy. Never had men thought so bravely, spoken so brilliantly, or lifted themselves to a greater height of culture and courtesy. “Alas!” said Louis XVI, standing in his Temple prison before the books of Voltaire and Rousseau, “these are the men that have destroyed France.” Yes, they had destroyed one France, but they had liberated another, not to speak of freeing America through their disciples, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson.

This is the best I can do, far off here in the Pacific, between two hemispheres and two ages. I look back to the Orient and wonder how a Confucian scholar or a Hindu Brahman would smile at my dates. The one would inquire courteously where the T’ang Dynasty entered into my list—an age as great in China as the Enlightenment in France. The other would ask about Akbar or Asoka, and I could only answer that Asoka belongs to Buddha, and Akbar to Mohammed.

I know how partial and provincial all lists must be.We are all born within frontiers of space and time and, struggle as we will, we never escape from our boxes. To us, civilization means Europe and America, and the Orient, which considers us barbaric, seems barbarous.