Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day

by G. J. Whitrow

  Arthur Lovejoy has pointed out that one of the principal features of eighteenth-century thought was the temporalizing of what has been called 'the great chain of being', that is the idea that the universe is composed of an immense number of links arranged in hierarchical order. For, although to many minds of that century the idea of a world in which

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  no emergence of novelty was possible seemed completely satisfying, there were others who felt that the chain of being 'must perforce be reinterpreted so as to admit of progress in general'.10

  Among those in the eighteenth century who philosophized about the historical process as a whole and tried to discover the laws that govern it were Turgot and Condorcet in France, Priestley in England, and Kant in Germany. It has been claimed that Turgot's address at the Sorbonne in December 1750, when he was only 23 years old, on 'A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind' was the first systematic statement of the modern idea of progress.11 In his Notes on Universal History, which he wrote the following year, he acknowledged the influence of Bossuet, but his approach to the subject was purely secular. In it he showed that, while the natural talents of men are everywhere the same, the particular characteristics of a society are the inevitable consequences of its own past. Turgot's writings greatly influenced Condorcet, who wrote the first biography of Turgot, whom he regarded as the real discoverer of the 'law of progress'. Like so many of his contemporaries, including the young Wordsworth, Condorcet was convinced of his good fortune in living during one of the greatest revolutions in history and being able to recognize its true significance. Ironically, he came under suspicion following the expulsion from the Convention in June 1793 of the Girondins, with whom he was friendly. He managed to hide in a house in Paris, where he composed his Sketch, but on 25 March 1794 he left the house and two days later was arrested. The following morning he was found dead in his cell.

  In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, published in 1795, one year after his death, Condorcet expressed his belief in the inevitability of human progress and in the power of science and technology to transform man's knowledge and control over himself and society. He viewed history as a sequence of ten distinct stages, each arising necessarily from the preceding one. In the first stage man lived in a state of primitive savagery. In the following stages he progressed first by improving the means of production and later by developing his powers of reasoning. The current stage was the ninth, beginning with Descartes' philosophy and culminating in the foundation of the French Republic. The tenth and final stage would be government by scientists. Confidence in the future progress of mankind was also expressed by the scientist Joseph Priestley ( 1733-1804), who sought refuge in America after his house, library, and laboratory had been burnt by a Birmingham

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  mob because of his sympathy for the French revolutionary leaders. There he sought to found a libertarian utopia.

  A more profound view of history was developed in 1784 by Immanuel Kant ( 1724- 1804), who in An Idea for a Universal Historyfrom a Cosmopolitan Point of View argued that, although man wills concord, nature knows better what is good for the species and consequently wills discord. Indeed, the difficulty with the teleological theory of progress that was so widely accepted not only by Condorcet but by many others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that its validity depended on the unquestioned acceptance of the end to which it was directed, since most progressivists 'unconsciously arrogated to the present a kind of divine right which was arbitrarily denied to all other periods of time'.12 As Montesquieu and others have pointed out, to carry over into other centuries all the ideas of the period in which one lives is one of the most fertile sources of error.

  A pessimistic view of history, and an over-optimistic view of human nature, was taken by Rousseau. Soon after he had rejected modern science and civilization in his prize essay of 1749 he threw away his watch, perhaps influenced subconsciously by the fact that his native city, Geneva, was one of the two main centres (the other being London) of the clock industry. It has been said that no doubt Rousseau would have been happy in Samuel Butler Erewhon, where the mere possession of a watch made one liable to imprisonment.13 M. J. Temmer has drawn attention to the decisive influence on Rousseau's thought of his reading of St Augustine and hence his love of the static eternity of the Augustinian paradise, and also to Rousseau's 'elegiac desire to live the future in the mode of the past'.14

  Rousseau's arch-enemy Voltaire was also not a progressivist and even rejected the idea of physical and biological evolution. In an essay of 1769 he argued that the earth has always remained as it was when first created, except for the effects of 'the hundred and fifty days of the Deluge'. As for the marine fossils that had been found on the slopes of Mont Cenis, he attributed their presence so far from the sea to one or other of three alternative possible causes: either collectors had deliberately placed them there, or farmers had brought them there in loads of lime to fertilize the soil, or pilgrims on their way to Rome had accidentally dropped the cockleshell badges from their hats.15

  The greatest philosopher of history in the eighteenth century was an obscure and poorly paid professor of rhetoric in the University of Naples, Giambattista Vico ( 1668-1744). Although in his early years he was a

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  follower of Descartes, he gradually came to realize that Cartesianism is applicable as a method only to mathematics and logic and not to our understanding of the external world of nature and society. He not only rejected Descartes's negative attitude to history but he also discarded Descartes's principle of universal doubt as a philosophical starting-point. Vico began instead with the novel idea that, in order to know anything, we must have created it ourselves. Isaiah Berlin has drawn attention to the partial anticipation of this idea by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa ( 1401-64), who remarked that mathematics was purely a human creation which we know because we alone have made it, but he did not go on, as Vico did, to extend this insight to historical knowledge and other humane studies.16 On the basis of what is often referred to as ' Vico's principle of the equivalence of verum and factum', he argued that, whereas the world of nature can only be fully understood by God, man can understand mathematics because it is his own creation. Similarly--and here he clashed fundamentally with Descartes--Vico believed that history is also understandable, because social institutions, languages, customs, and laws have all been developed by the actions of men, without being pre-ordained. Vico respected mathematics and recognized its value in our attempts to understand the physical world, but he did not identify the two. Moreover, he believed that, since human nature is governed by free will and caprice, mathematical methods cannot be effectively applied to it, or at most only in very circumscribed ways. Vico's originality can be more readily appreciated by us today, although so much of what he advocated now seems commonplace, when we recall that a hundred years after his time Auguste Comte still sought to call his own new science (sociology) by the name of 'social physics', and later still, in 1872, Walter Bagehot gave to his well-known book on the evolution of society the title Physics and Politics. ( Bagehot seems to have had a peculiar idea of 'physics', since the subtitle of his book is Thoughts on the application of the principles of 'natural selection' and 'inheritance' to political society.)

  Vico's masterpiece was his book Scienza nuova (the title may have been suggested to him by Bacon Novum organum of about a century earlier). The first edition was published in 1725 and the third (revised) edition in 1744. In it Vico maintained that man is a being who can only be understood historically. In other words, knowledge of the past is vital to an understanding of ourselves. He particularly objected to the tendency of reading back into the minds of primitive people modes of thought and feeling that are themselves the product of a long period of historical

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  development. Vico believed that every theory must start from the point where the subject of which it treats began to take shape
. As Isaiah Berlin has pointed out, 'This is the whole doctrine of historicism in embryo."17 Vico admired the sixteenth-century historian Bodin, who had partially anticipated him by noting that fables and myths can often provide useful evidence of the beliefs of primitive peoples.

  Although Vico believed in the existence of historical cycles, he interpreted this concept in a more sophisticated way than had previous believers in it. He thought that certain periods of history had a general basic nature, influencing every detail, which reappeared in certain other periods, so that it was possible to argue by analogy from one such period to another. For example, he drew a parallel between the barbarism of the Christian early Middle Ages in western Europe and the barbarism of the Homeric age, pointing out certain common features, such as rule by a warrior-aristocracy, a ballad-literature, etc. He called such periods 'heroic'. He did not think that history is strictly circular, because novelties are always being created. As R. G. Collingwood has said of Vico's concept of recurrence, 'it is not a circle but a spiral; for history never repeats itself but comes round in each new phase in a form differentiated by what has gone before'.18 Thus, the barbarism of the western Middle Ages differed from that of Homeric Greece through the influence of Christianity. Vico thought, however, that similar periods tend to recur in the same order; for example, a heroic period is always followed by what he called a 'classical period', in which thought prevails over imagination, prose over poetry, and so forth.

  Scienza nuova was very obscurely written and was long neglected. It became famous only about a hundred years after its first publication, when it was discovered almost by accident on a trip to Italy in the 1820s by the great French historian Michelet, who translated it into French and thereby created Vico's reputation. In his monumental History of France Michelet declared that Vico did for history what Newton half a century earlier had done for physics. Even if this comparison may seem excessive, there is no doubt that Vico can be regarded as the first exponent of the modern belief that, in order to understand the nature and structure of society, we must study all of its aspects in historical perspective, that is, from the standpoint of time. Although no English translation of Scienza nuova appeared until after the Second World War, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Oxford philosopher and historian of Roman Britain R. G. Collingwood was greatly influenced by Vico, but in this he was almost alone in the English-speaking world. Nowadays Vico has come to be

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  regarded as the foremost Italian philosopher and one of the greatest philosophers of history of all time.

  A prominent German philosopher of history in the eighteenth century who appreciated the fundamental importance of historical perspective was Johann Gottfried Herder ( 1744-1803). He rejected 'absolute values' and argued against there being invariant laws of history which are valid for all people and all times. Instead, he believed in 'historical relativism', according to which every culture (and every age) has its own character and intrinsic value by which alone it should be judged. Herder's main work, in four volumes, published from 1784 onwards, was translated into English in 1800 by T. O. Churchill under the title Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Unlike Vico, Herder's influence was soon felt by historians, and this century his ideas were reformulated and elaborated by Oswald Spengler. Isaiah Berlin has provided a stimulating critical account of Herder.19

  Whereas Vico had restricted the scope of his 'new science' to the history of society and the field of the humanities, the philosopher Immanuel Kant ( 1724-1804) maintained that only the physical universe (excluding biological species which he was convinced were not subject to evolution) was the product of continual change and development.20 Herder, however, was convinced that the historical process embraced the lot, namely, the physical universe, the living world, and human society, although it must be stressed that his point of view 'constituted a philosophical vision rather than a scientific theory'.21

  Not surprisingly, Herder was extremely critical of the anti-historical prejudices of the French encyclopédistes, for example as revealed by their dismissal of Homer as 'a Greek philosopher, theologian, and poet', whose epic poems were 'unlikely to be read much in the future'!22 As the intellectual forerunners of he French Revolution of 1789, the encyclopédistes inspired widespread belief in the existence of certain fundamental timeless truths which led the more fanatical revolutionaries to proclaim that they were laying down laws not merely for France but for the entire universe!

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  10. Evolution and the Industrial Revolution

  The evolutionary universe

  Although Vico laid great stress on the need to view man historically, he did not regard man as emerging out of nature, nor did he think that the natural world had a history of its own. During the course of the eighteenth century, however, the belief began to spread that the idea of time is an essential part of the idea of nature. Just as acceptance of the Copernican theory had shattered the tightly knit confines of the world in space, so similarly the tendency to look at things historically led to a correspondingly vast extension of the world in time.

  In his revolt against the then prevailing Aristotelian philosophy of nature, Descartes, like Newton half a century later, regarded all matter, both terrestrial and celestial, as subject to the same physical laws. As a mechanical determinist, however, he did not invoke divine intervention to explain the origin of the solar system. In his Principia of 1644 he tried to explain the uniformity of direction of motions in the solar system and their approximation to the plane of the ecliptic by his theory of vortices. He assumed that originally the world was filled with matter distributed as uniformly as possible, and he sketched out qualitatively a theory of successive formation of the sun and planets, including the earth, which he regarded as composed of a series of different layers.

  Descartes' idea of the universe evolving by natural processes of separation and combination was the source of a succession of theories of cosmic evolution. Nearly a century later, Swedenborg, in his Principia of 1734, advocated a modified view of the Cartesian cosmogony. He suggested that the planets were ejected from the sun, but his idea of how this may have happened was rejected by Buffon who, in 1745, put forward the first tidal theory of the origin of the solar system. Assuming that comets were far more massive than we believe today, Buffon suggested that a comet colliding with the sun may have torn out sufficient material to form the planets.

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  Neither Swedenborg nor Buffon applied Newtonian ideas to the problems of cosmogony. The first to do so was Immanuel Kant in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, published in 1755. He assumed that initially all matter was in a gaseous state spread more or less uniformly, except for some primeval regions of higher density which acted as centres of condensation under the action of gravitation. One such centre was the origin of the solar system. Kant thought that eventually through collisions coplanar circular orbits with motions all in the same sense about the sun could arise. He was mistaken in thinking that this phenomenon was automatically possible, because it contradicts the dynamical principle of the conservation of angular momentum and hence Newton's laws of motion. (This dynamical principle, however, was not formulated in full generality until 1775, by Euler). Laplace's nebular hypothesis, put forward in 1796, was free from this defect, and his primeval solar nebula was assumed to rotate initially. The idea of cosmical evolution, as distinct from the old idea of cosmical cycles, was also suggested by the great pioneer of modern observational astronomy, William Herschel. In a paper published in 1814 he claimed that 'the state into which the incessant action of clustering power has brought the Milky Way at present is 2 kind of chronometer that may be used to measure the time of its past and future existence'.1

  One of the obstacles that the idea of evolution had to contend with was the widespread inherited conviction that the range of past time was severely limited. Bible-based chronology had already become a severe strait-jacket for scientists studying the nature of fossils. In the sev
enteenth century both Steno and Hooke realized that fossils were the petrified traces of former living organisms. They were led to develop a dynamical theory of geological change but were confronted with the difficulty of fitting this into the accepted time-scale. The naturalist John Ray was at first inclined to accept the views of Steno and Hooke about fossils. He suggested that, if Steno were right in asserting that mountains had not all existed from the beginning, then perhaps 'the world is a great deal older than is imagined or believed'. Eventually, however, under the influence of his theological beliefs he changed his opinion about fossils in favour of an inorganic origin and reverted to the traditional, and then still widely accepted, non-evolutionary concept of the natural world. Arthur Lovejoy has drawn attention to the following forthright statement, made by Ray in 1703: 'Consult the evidence of experience; elements always the same, species that never vary, seeds and germs prepared in advance for the perpetuation of everything . . . so that

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  we can say, Nothing new under the sun, no species which has not been seen since the beginning.'2

  During the eighteenth century scientists and others began to discard the Bible-based chronology of nature. In 1721, Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes asked 'Is it possible for those who understand nature and have a reasonable idea of God to believe that matter and created things are only 6,000 years old?' Later that century, Diderot thought in millions of years and Kant suggested that the universe may be hundreds of millions of years old. Buffon, when writing his Époques de la nature, published in 1778, privately estimated that the first stages of the cooling of the earth would have required at least a million years.3 In print he was more cautious and estimated the earth's age as being at least 75,000 years. Some of his ideas were condemned by the faculty of theology of the University of Paris.4