The Path Between The Gods And Science

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday December 3, 2005

HUGH DILLON. Hugh Dillon is a Sydney magistrate.

An extraordinary tapestry of ideas is woven from the history of intellectual thought, writes HUGH DILLON.

Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

By Peter Watson

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 822pp, $69.95

In the mid-1980s, Peter Watson, then a journalist with The Observer, interviewed the philosopher Willard van Orman Quine at Harvard University. When he got home to London, he discovered very few of his colleagues on the newspaper had even heard of Quine. It was at this point that his great project of narrating the intellectual history of the 20th century, which he published in 2000 as A Terrible Beauty, was conceived. In the intellectual equivalent of back-to-back marathons, Watson now seeks to cover the rest of human history.

The first person to conceive of intellectual history was, according to Watson, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). He thought that without taking the dominating ideas of a given age into account, any history of it was "blind". This is clearly Watson's own view. It is, perhaps, an interesting example of the history of an idea, that Watson's idea of history is built on Bacon's foundation. For Watson, however, Arthur Lovejoy, founder in 1940 of the Journal of the History of Ideas at Johns Hopkins University, is the keystone of modern intellectual history and this book rests heavily on Lovejoy's legacy.

If Bacon (and Watson) are correct, the history of ideas ought be a major affair for university departments of history and humanities, yet it appears not to be so. Perhaps this reflects the temporary triumph of post-modernism and the downfall of Grand Theory, or merely the tendency towards specialisation in history, as in all disciplines.

Whatever the explanation, Watson has, in his two splendid volumes, constructed a massive arch across the specialties. Intellectual history is by no means the "orphan discipline" Isaiah Berlin once declared it, but there is, as far as I can discover in the catalogues of the best British, American and Australian libraries, nothing in English quite like Watson's two-volume work.

In his History of Western Philosophy, itself a great work of intellectual history, Bertrand Russell describes philosophy as "something intermediate between theology and science". Watson's narrative soaks up all three disciplines and more, such as palaeontology, archaeology, linguistics and economics. For Watson, intellectual history involves abstract and applied ideas - inventions and discoveries.

In a fascinating introduction, he describes the organising theories of history developed by thinkers since the 12th century (so often, curiously, with a tripartite structure), before plumping for "the soul", "Europe" and "the experiment" as the three most influential human ideas. He concedes this to be a bold selection. (There are many contenders: his index lists several hundred in eight closely packed pages.)

At first glance, Watson might appear to be following in the footsteps of the army of Western historians who have chronicled and rationalised the rise of the West during the past millennium. Unlike most universal historians, he has, however, made the debatable decision to give wars and political crises relatively little weight. His approach is more subtle. It is the clash of interior (spiritual/religious) and exterior (scientific/empirical) modes of thinking that provides the spinal column of the book. He has taken to heart Pope's adage that "the proper study of mankind is man" rather than Great Men, so the propulsive force behind his investigations is the tension between theology, philosophy and science, although wars and revolutions sometimes feature in the distant background.

The work divides into three main sections. The first, set in prehistory and the ancient world, deals with the evolution of the imagination from the use of tools to art, language and religious thought. This is the world of the "soul". The second, what Watson calls "the great hinge of history", concerns the sudden emergence of Europe from the Dark Ages, a more important event than the Renaissance. For Watson, "Europe" is a compendium of all the ideas we now recognise as modern. The third section tackles the scientific revolution and its challenge to religious thought and the world of "the soul".

My summary, however, inadequately represents the strength of this magisterial work. Although Watson has his own hierarchy of influential ideas, he writes respectfully of specialist thinkers and luminously analyses their research and theories, weaving in and out of, and synthesising, an extraordinary array of complex fields. His capacity, from lucid prose and the breadth and intelligence of his scholarship, to fabricate a brilliant tapestry of ideas qualifies Watson (if such a thing is still possible) as a "Renaissance man". He is a heavyweight with a light touch.

Most of the book is concerned with the ideas of others, however Watson's conclusions are themselves cause for deep thought. Anyone who reads the book and is attached (as most of us Western heirs of the Greeks are) to the notion of an "inner life" will be troubled by his conclusion that science's last great mystery - consciousness - is a dead end, that there are no "better angels of our nature".

He has an argument to make, but his primary concern is expository and analytical rather than polemical and his tone is civilised rather than hectoring. Agree with him or not, the general reader who enjoys the sheer pleasure of finding things out will find Watson a stretch and a thought-provoking challenge.