CHAPTER ONE: SCIENCE & LIBERTY
“Everything of importance”: Jefferson Hane Weaver, The World of Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 683. The same point was made by the Islamic Indian poet Humayun Kabir: “There have been brilliant scientists and speculators in ancient India, China, Egypt and Greece, but like solitary stars in the firmament they shone in splendid isolation.” Humayun Kabir, Science, Democracy and Islam (London: George Allen, 1955), 10. As the twentieth-century physicist Hans Bethe noted, “Most philosophical questions were quite well answered by the old Greeks, and even better by people from 1500 to 1800 [but] science is always more unsolved questions, and its great advantage is you can prove something is true or something is false.” (Associated Press obituary of Hans Bethe, March 7, 2005.)
eighty-nine democracies: Freedom House “Freedom in the World 2009 Survey,” http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=445 (accessed March 31, 2009).
“There is but one state of learning”: Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, preface.
“Freedom of inquiry”: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 6:986.
“the three greatest men that have ever lived”: Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Trumbull, February 15, 1789.
“The society of scientists is simple”: Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 68.
“Men have asked for freedom”: Ibid., 70.
One factor is wealth: See Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts.” World Politics 49.2 (1997) 155–83, and a discussion in Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003), 69ff.
“the role of thought is to explain and transmit”: The Economist, July 6, 2002, 27.
“I approve of democratic ideals”: World Values Survey, in Mark Leonard, Rouzbeh Pirouz, “Iraqis Don’t Need More Propaganda,” International Herald Tribune, February 6, 2004.
“a monarchy is a merchantman”: Fisher Ames, address to the House of Representatives, 1795.
“Perfect democracy is an illusion”: Stein Ringen, Democracy, Science, and the Civic Spirit: An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 14. The lecture was originally delivered before the University of Oxford on October 27, 1992.
“Nature is only subdued by submission”: Bacon, Novum Organum, I:1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 107.
CHAPTER TWO: SCIENCE & LIBERALISM
“one very simple principle”: J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin, 1985), 28. Two centuries earlier, in chapter 21 of his Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes defined liberty as “freedom…the absence of opposition (by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion).”
“There are no aims of education”: Andrew Abbott, “Welcome to the University of Chicago,” address to incoming freshmen, September 26, 2002. Italics added.
“Those are not at all to be tolerated”: John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Stilwell, KS: Digireads, 2005), 172. Available online at http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1651-1700/locke/ECT/toleraxx.htm (accessed November 16, 2004).
“I beseech ye”: Learned Hand, address to 150,000 newly naturalized American citizens, New York City’s Central Park, May 21, 1944; Oliver Cromwell, letter to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, August 1650.
“The starting point of liberal thought”: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 76.
“Where there is no law there is no freedom”: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Hackett, 1980), 32.
“Opinion tends to encroach more on liberty”: J. S. Mill to Harriet Taylor, January 15, 1855; in J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin, 1985), 23.
“The application of the teachings of science”: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, xix. Materialistic criteria can inform decisions often assumed to be primarily or exclusively matters of ethics and morality. It was possible, for instance, to oppose slavery simply by testing the postulate that slave economies perform poorly by comparison to free economies. The economic calculus goes like this: A slave will not work as hard to tend a master’s field as he would his own, unless he is constantly harassed by an overseer—and that requires the presence of two men where one would do, were that one man free. Hence slavery is unproductive. Universal health care can similarly be defended simply on grounds that it improves both the health (and hence the productivity) of the workforce—and its mobility, the latter by freeing those who previously got their health insurance through their employers to seek work wherever they please. People may introduce moral or emotional arguments as they wish, but the “cold and heartless” quantitative approach is more revealing than it is given credit for.
“We are socialists”: John Toland, Adolph Hitler (New York: Anchor, 1976), 224–25. Toland attributes this quotation to Hitler, others to Hitler’s Nazi Party rival Gregor Strasser.
“Whether democracy should be defined”: Reinhold Niebuhr, “Russia and the West,” The Nation, January 16, 1943, 83.
Only 20 percent of Americans: National Election Study, Pew, Harris, and Democracy Corps polls; Patricia Cohen, “Proclaiming Liberalism, and What It Now Means,” the New York Times, June 2, 2007. Cohen notes that the 20 percent figure has held steady “since at least 1992.”
The divisions imposed on Korea and China: CIA World Factbook, 2008, expressed in purchasing-power parity (ppp). The contrast is even more imposing when it is taken into account that China and North Korea have considerably more natural resources than do Taiwan and South Korea.
“highest quality of life”: The Economist Pocket World in Figures (London: Profile, 2007).
“All institutions of freedom”: Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 30.
“science unifies humanity”: Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 63.
“Science could contain values”: Ibid., 95.
“In an advancing society”: H. B. Phillips. “On the Nature of Progress.” American Scientist 33 (1945), 255.
The value of individual creativity: It was once widely assumed that scientific and technological innovations would increase the power of big governments and big corporations at the expense of the average individual. Students in the 1960s, obliged to register for courses by filling out punch cards to be read by the big mainframe computers in the college administration building, demonstrated, carrying signs reading, “I am a human being. Please do not fold, mutilate, or staple me!” One visionary who glimpsed a different technological future was the science writer James Gerald Crowther, who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, “At present science is developing in the direction of big instruments and organizations [but] it seems probable that it will evolve through this phase, and arrive at a new and higher one in which its instruments will again be small and compact. Science may show how a man can provide all his needs…from very small instruments and concentrated supplies carried in his pockets…. If science is developed to this stage, it would provide new concrete bases for freedom.” J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science, xxvii, in Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London: George Allen, 1943), 165–66. Crowther had trouble imagining what such “instruments” would be like—human imagination seldom being capable of foreseeing such a thing as cell phones with more computing power than the Apollo lunar lander.
“not the work of philosophers”: Mill, “Bentham,” in his Utilitarianism and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 1987), 134.
“all theory was against it and all experience for it”: Ibid.
The people as a “beast,” etc.: Ibid., 19; Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left (London: Penguin, 2007), 162; Plato, Republic, VI, 493B; Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643, pt. II, sec. 1; Wentworth Dillon, Essay on Translated Verse, l. 96; Stendhal, De l’Amour, 1822, Fragments; Tennyson, The Princess, Conclusion, l. 54; Thoreau and Carlyle, in James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, 2005), xv, xvi.
“You’re nobody if you don’t get booed”: Robert Hilburn, “Some Q&A with Bob Dylan,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2001, 20.
“I surveyed them in every way”: Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 14.
“peculiarities in the silkworm”: Charles Darwin, Origin of Species [1859] (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 19, 32, 36.
“the stupidity and wrong-headedness of many”: Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen, 1908), 246.
“stern compulsion ought to be exerted”: Ibid., 311.
“the freedom to marry”: Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
“The sixpenny fee deterred practical joking”: Francis Galton, “Vox Populi,” Nature, March 7, 1907, 450.
“more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment”: Ibid. The weight estimate Galton published was the statistical mean of all the legible tickets.
“random crowds of people with nothing better to do”: Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, 4. Contestants on this particular quiz show had the option of polling the audience, who at most shows leave the studio without having been asked for their opinions.
“Being an informed participant citizen”: Gerald Holton, “How to Think about the ‘Anti-Science’ Phenomenon.” Public Understand. Sci. 1:103–128 (1992).
CHAPTER THREE: THE RISE OF SCIENCE
The European region that best fit those criteria was Italy: This point is made, with some exaggeration, by Harry Lime, the villain in Orson Welles’s film The Third Man: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!” (Script by Graham Greene, Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, and Orson Welles.)
“our liberty, which we have inherited from our forefathers”: Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Volume 1: The Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 7.
“God’s most precious gift to human nature”: Dante, Monarchy, in Skinner, Foundations, 16.
“the eldest child of liberty”: William Wordsworth, “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic.” In the fifteenth century the Venetians tried an elaborate system that combined ballot voting with chance. A thousand or more Venetian patricians lined up and each picked one marble, thirty of which were gilded. Each time a patrician happened to get a gilded marble, his relatives were all escorted from the hall and excluded from further selection, to prevent undue influence by any one family. Once the thirty had been chosen, twenty-one of them were eliminated by another random draw. The remaining nine then voted for a total of forty electors, whose numbers were reduced to twelve by another round of drawing by gilded marbles. The twelve then elected twenty-five more electors, of whom sixteen were randomly eliminated…and so on.
“There is no city in the world where merit is more recognized”: Domenico Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1997), 70.
“It is impossible to judge of equality”: Casanova, History of My Life, William R. Trask, trans. (New York: Knopf, 2007), 233–34.
“being unarmed…causes you to be despised”: Machiavelli, The Prince, chapters 8 and 14.
“the principal matter…is for a courtier”: Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, in Geoffrey R. Elton, ed., Renaissance and Reformation 1300–1648, Thomas Hoby, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 75–78.
Michelangelo’s larger-than-life sculpture David: This is not to say that Michelangelo gave much weight to politics in accepting commissions. His Pietà was sculpted on commission by a cardinal in Rome, and he cast a gigantic bronze of Pope Julius II (it was later destroyed) in Bologna to commemorate and cement the pope’s recent conquest of that city. The fresco to cover his remarkable cartoon the Battle of Cascina in Florence was never executed, Michelangelo having decamped for Rome in response to an offer of more money.
Leonardo’s “thought seems always to be moving”: John Herman Randall Jr. “The Place of Leonardo da Vinci in the Emergence of Modern Science.” Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 14, no. 2 (April 1953): 195. Randall adds that Leonardo, given his fascination with hands-on experimentation and inventing, might “have found Edison more congenial than Einstein.”
“I am fully aware”: Irma A. Richter, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 2. Trans. slightly altered by T.F. See also Jacob Bronowski, “Leonardo da Vinci,” in Richard M. Ketchum, ed., The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 187–88.
“You designed a horse to be cast in bronze”: George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1996), 47.
“a world on paper”: Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (New York: Dover, 1987), 15.
invoking an irrational number: Vincenzio was ahead of his time on this issue. By the end of the seventeenth century, a new system of “tempered” tuning was developed—based, indeed, on an irrational number, the twelfth root of two. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier to demonstrate its advantages. Galileo’s biographer Stillman Drake speculates that this work of Bach’s “would never have been written had Zarlino won the argument against Galileo’s father.” Drake, Galileo at Work, 16.
“a hundred times heavier”: Laura Fermi and Gilberto Bernardini, Galileo and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1961), 15.
“It is impossible to obtain wages from a republic”: Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Anchor, 1957), 65.
“Here the freedom and the way of life of every class”: Giovanni Sagredo to Galileo, 1611.
“I deem it my greatest glory”: Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 62.
“to punish me for my contempt for authority”: Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (New York: Viking, 1973), 24.
“the prohibition of the printing and sale of my Dialogues”: Galileo to Cardinal Barberini, October 13, 1632.
“errors and heresies”: Galileo’s abjuration, in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, ed. and trans., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 292.
“see that just as nature has given to them”: Letter to Paolo Gualdo, in Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 84.
“since if they had seen what we see”: Ibid., 135.
“In the discovery of secret things”: William Gilbert, De Magnete, P. Pleury Mottelay, trans. (New York: Dover, 1958), 1, 14–15.
“dampened the glory of Italian wits”: Domenico Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1997), 233.
“that there had been men before Adam”: Margaret Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 28.
rioters who sacked his house: The Priestley Riots, as they are known to history, were provoked by Priestley’s outspoken skepticism about certain articles of religious faith, among them the doctrines of the Trinity and of virgin birth. (He was a “dissenting” theologian.) The proximate cause was troublemaking by a clique seeking to curry favor with the Church of England. Having fomented the riots by circulating various lies and exaggerations about Priestley, they celebrated by drinking till dawn at a pub called the Swan. When the sun rose, one of the plotters—Benjamin Spencer, the Vicar of Aston—rode out to survey the smoking ruins of Priestley’s home and looted them of Priestley’s scientific papers. They were never recovered.
“All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed”: Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, “The Plan,” James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, trans. In The Works of Francis Bacon (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1863), http://www.constitution.org/bacon/instauration.htm.
“I showed what the laws of nature were”: Descartes, Discourse on Method, part V, Robert Stoothoof, trans. In John Cottingham et al., trans., Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 41.
“becalmed ships”: Basil Montagu, The Life of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England (London: Pickering, 1833), 10.
came as a guest and not as an enemy: Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Life and Writings of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review), 1837.
He dismissed Copernicus’: Bacon’s objection typically was that these researchers had induced too wide a range of concepts from their few experiments. “The race of chemists, again out of a few experiments of the furnace, have built up a fantastic philosophy, framed with reference to a few things; and Gilbert also, after he had employed himself most laboriously in the study and observation of the loadstone, proceeded at once to construct an entire system in accordance with his favorite subject.” Bacon, Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LIV.
“Bacon…possessed in a most eminent degree the genius of philosophy”: H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (New York: Harper, 1876), 69.
“It will be seen amidst the erection of temples”: Bacon, Novum Organum, in Montagu, Life of Francis Bacon, 465.
“shut up in the cells of a few authors”: Montagu, Life of Francis Bacon, 7; “For inquiries in new and unlabored parts of learning” Ibid., endnote K; “Spin cobwebs of learning” Ibid., 7.
“to escape upwards from this Satan-ridden earth”: Willey, Basil, The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 32.
“the ostentation of dispute”: Bacon, Novum Organum, 1:20.
“They certainly have this in common with children”: Ibid., 1:71.
“The reverence for antiquity”: Ibid., 1:84.
“the discovery of things is to be taken from the light of nature”: Ibid., 1:122.
you find them to be not empty notions but well defined: Ibid., 1:14; ibid., Preface; The Great Instauration, “The Arguments,” in Sidney Warhaft, ed., Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982), 314–15.
“familiarity between the mind and things”: Bacon, Magna Instauratio, opening sentence.
“a sort of soft and stinking mud”: Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 100.
“in every street, carts and coaches”: Stephen Inwood, A History of London (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 204.
“I don’t think much of my way of life”: Ackroyd, London, 133.
“None but the clergy”: Joseph Priestley, “Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life,” 1765.
“It is by instruments and helps that the work is done”: Bacon, Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man, II.
“Nature to be commanded must be obeyed”: Ibid., III; “Knowledge itself is power” Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae 11, “de Haeresibus,” 1597.
“New artificial metals”: Bacon, New Atlantis (Philadelphia: Franklin Library, 1982), 382ff.
“He wrote like a philosopher and lived like a prince”: Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 170.
“to provide instruction to sailors and merchants”: Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 52.
“all knowledge is to be limited by religion”: Bacon, Valerius Terminus, ch. 1, in Philosophical Works, J. M. Robertson, ed. (London: Longmans, 1905), 186.
“the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised”: Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, letter 12, “On Chancellor Bacon.”
“Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last”: Abraham Cowley, “To the Royal Society,” lines 93–98.
“I have only taken upon me to ring a bell”: Bacon, letter to Dr. Playfer, in I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 152.
“men’s thoughts are frozen here”: Descartes, letter of January 15, 1650, in Oeuvres De Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1983), vol 5, 467; and The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), vol. 3, 383.
“purely mathematical type of mind”: D. E. Smith, History of Mathematics (New York: Dover, 1951), vol. 1, 376.
“The only principles which I accept, or require”: Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 88.
explain things but predict next to nothing: Peter Dear puts this aptly in Revolutionizing the Sciences: “An Aristotelian world was not one in which there were countless new things to be discovered; instead, it was one in which there were countless things, mostly already known, left to be explained. That Aristotle himself does not seem to have believed this is beside the point; it was nonetheless the lesson that his scholastic followers in medieval and early-modern Europe tended to draw from those of his writings that they found most interesting and most teachable.” (132)
“good sense is of all things”: Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences, Elizabeth Haldane, trans., Part I.
“the increasing discovery of my own ignorance”: Ibid., 46.
“preoccupation with the indubitable”: “René Descartes,” in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 2, 346.
“I have explained the phenomena of the heavens”: Newton, Principia, I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 943.
“although the whole of philosophy is not immediately evident”: Ibid., 61.
56 cogito ergo sum: If Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” is reworded to repair the logical circularity invoked by assuming the existence of an “I” in order to establish its existence, it devolves into the rather inconsequential statement, “Thinking transpires, therefore somebody must be thinking!” For an able discussion concerning English translations of Newton’s “fingo,” see I. Bernard Cohen, “The First English Version of Newton’s Hypotheses Non Fingo,” Isis, vol. 53, no. 3 (September 1962): 379–88.
“a largely unintelligible book”: I. Bernard Cohen, “The Newtonian Revolution in Science,” in Paul Theerman and Adele Seeff, eds., Action and Reaction: Proceedings of a Symposium to Commemorate the Tercentenary of Newton’s Principia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 77.
“a conqueror rather than a rebel”: Hunter Crowther-Heyck, review of A. Rupert Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), H-Ideas, February 2001, 2. Crowther-Heyck is paraphrasing Hall.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE SCIENCE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
“Newton rose at once to the highest pinnacle of glory”: Thomas Thomson, History of the Royal Society, from Its Institution to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London: Baldwin, 1812), 342.
“the greatest and rarest genius”: Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1996), 130.
“God said ‘Let Newton be’”: Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man” [1734].
“people were beginning to dispute”: Gay, Enlightenment, 129.
“We are all his disciples now”: Ibid.
“one of the architects of our civil liberties”: Freeman Dyson, “A New Newton,” New York Review of Books, Volume 50, Number 11 (July 3, 2003).
“he was perpetually unbuttoning the stores of his royal wisdom”: G. M. Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England (London: Penguin, 1987), 279.
“kings exercise…divine power on earth”: John Cannon and Ralph Griffiths, The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 356. The divine-right doctrine was upheld by contemporary royalists like Sir Robert Filmer (1590–1653). Knighted by a like-minded Charles I, Filmer argued that nations are like families and monarchs their fathers and mothers, and that therefore (!) regents are above all earthly law, just as parents are not to be ordered around by their children. (They enjoy what Filmer called the “Fatherly Right of Sovereign Authority.”) Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was written to refute Filmer’s Patriarchia, or the Natural Power of Kings (published posthumously in 1680). Otherwise Filmer is of interest today chiefly because his stance, if inverted, becomes perhaps the strongest argument for having a constitutional monarch with little real power rather than having no regent at all. This argument states that (1) Many people are naïve enough to regard their chief of state as a father figure; (2) A figurehead monarch serves as a kind of lightning rod for this misplaced affection, and so helps citizens evaluate their real leaders in a clearer light, free from a confusing nimbus of sentimentality; (3) The nation’s actual leader—the prime minister, say—is spared presiding over ribbon cuttings and other ceremonial duties handled by the monarch, and so has more time to get work done—or go fishing, during which recreation he or she may conceivably come upon a useful idea.
“Literature and science were…surrounded with pomp”: Lord Macaulay, The History of England (London: Penguin, 1986), 180–181.
“He was the steady friend of civil liberty”: Ibid., 184.
“Go your way and sin no more”: Ibid., 185.
“Go home”: Ibid., 196.
Whigs…and Tories: The word Whig originated as a slur—as have many other terms denoting political philosophies, including Tory, for “outlaw.” Originally reserved for country bumpkins, the term evidently came from a buttermilk-like drink favored by the bucolic poor. By the seventeenth century it was being applied to political rebels, particularly the Protestant insurgents who wrested control of western Scotland from the Royalists in 1648, and American revolutionaries who supported independence from the Crown. After 1689 it came to mean modern liberals, as opposed to the more conservative Tories. In the twentieth century Whig became a term of opprobrium for what the historian of science Herbert Butterfield called “the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), preface. This Butterfield deemed to be a bad thing, “the very sum and definition of all errors of historical inference. The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.” Ibid., 3–4. Although Butterfield’s essay occasioned little discussion prior to his death in 1979, his banner was later taken up by postmodernist academics alarmed “whenever history is written either by, or on behalf of, a
triumphant elite.” Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant, “Whig History and Present-Centered History,” The Historical Journal, 1988, vol. 31, no. 1, 3. In this rather circular way of thinking, to be “triumphant” means to argue that circumstances got materially better, and the “elite” is whoever made them better.
Newton met John Locke: There is some evidence that the two may have met previously, but in any event this was their first meeting subsequent to the publication of Newton’s Principia, which Locke in exile had greeted with great enthusiasm.
“be courageous therefore and steady to the laws”: James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 143; Newton to John Covel, February 21, 1689.
“the only philosophy then known at Oxford”: Bourne, Life of John Locke (New York: Harper, 1876), 48.
“the faithful product of observation”: Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (New York: MacMillan, 1957), 92.
“Drawn to the dregs of a Democracy”: Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel.”
“I appeal to the consciences of those that persecute, torment, destroy, and kill”: Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, text prepared by Garry Wiersema. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1651-1700/locke/ECT/toleraxx.htm (accessed November 16, 2004).
“no person whatsoever shall disturb, molest, or persecute”: Bourne, Life of John Locke, 242.
a seditious manuscript: Wrote Locke, in just one of the many paragraphs that would, if discovered by the king’s agents, have sufficed to cost him his life, “Despotical power is an absolute, arbitrary power one man has over another, to take away his life, whenever he pleases. This is a power, which neither nature gives, for it has made no such distinction between one man and another; nor compact can convey: for man not having such an arbitrary power over his own life, cannot give another man such a power over it; but it is the effect only of forfeiture, which the aggressor makes of his own life, when he puts himself into the state of war with another: for having quitted reason, which God hath given to be the rule betwixt man and man, and the common bond whereby human kind is united into one fellowship and society; and having renounced the way of peace which that teaches, and made use of the force of war, to compass his unjust ends upon another, where he has no right; and so revolting from his own kind to that of beasts, by making force, which is their’s, to be his rule of right, he renders himself liable to be destroyed by the injured person, and the rest of mankind, that will join with him in the execution of justice, as any other wild beast, or noxious brute, with whom mankind can have neither society nor security.” Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Sec. 172.
two retrograde regents: Both were enemies of religious tolerance and upholders of regal pomp. Philip, who instigated an Inquisition to suppress Calvinism in Holland, once said he would rather lose control of the Low Countries than see them lapse from Catholicism—which is just what happened. Louis, whose motto was “L’état c’est moi” (I am the state), was known to supplicants as the “Sun King” and to his detractors as “the new would-be Caesar.” He spent millions building the Versailles Palace, an elegant machine for beguiling and preoccupying noblemen who might otherwise have worked to abridge his peerless power.
“not in the hope of some better fortune”: Biographical note to Spinoza’s Ethics, W. H. White, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 352.
“the only certain and reliable criterion of truth”: Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, S. Shirley, trans. (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 126.
“The purpose of the state is freedom”: Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (New York: Norton, 2006), 102.
“Democracy is of all forms of government the most natural”: Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 787.
“The supreme mystery of despotism”: Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus; in Stewart, Courtier and Heretic, 100.
The Dutch innovated oil painting: The invention of oil painting as we think of it today is generally credited to the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, who around 1410 developed a stable, oil-based varnish, although oil paints themselves came into use a bit earlier. As Prof. John H. Lienhard of the University of Houston puts it, “Van Eyck was to oil painting what Watt was to the steam engine.” Lienhard, “Engines of Our Ingenuity,” 809, http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi809.htm (accessed March 22, 2009).
“We murder to dissect”: Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned” (1798); Blake, “The New Jerusalem,” from his Milton (1804–1808). D. H. Lawrence, a reliable amplifier of romantic opinions, wrote in the twentieth century, “The dark, satanic mills of Blake / how much more darker and more satanic they are now!”
“Here were products of a major European civilization”: Gary Schwartz, “Art in History,” in David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, eds., Art in History / History in Art (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1991), 8.
“Visitors continually marveled”: Israel, Dutch Republic, 1.
“I found myself in a storm”: Cranston, Locke, 3.
“In an age that produces such masters”: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter H. Nidditch, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 10. Still smarting at his woeful attempts to absorb Aristotelian philosophy at Oxford decades earlier, Locke goes on to assert that science would already have advanced much further “if the endeavors of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation. Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard and misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge. To break in upon the sanctuary of vanity and ignorance will be, I suppose, some service to human understanding.”
“He everywhere takes the light of physics for his guide”: Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, Letters on England, Letter XIII, “On Mr. Locke” (London: Cassell & Company, 1894); etext prepared by David Price, http://isis.library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/pg-html/pg/etext00/lteng10.txt (accessed May 25, 2005).
“not able to endure much”: Oxford English Dictionary, 2002.
“you endeavored to embroil me with women”: Newton to Locke, September 16, 1693.
“I have been…so entirely and sincerely your friend”: Locke to Newton, October 5, 1693.
“the greatest man in the world”: John Dunn, J. O. Urmston, and A. J. Ayer, The British Empiricists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 11.
small, informal gatherings to discuss science: The names of only two members of this little circle have come down to us. They are Dr. David Thomas, who had brought about Locke’s introduction to Lord Ashley; and James Tyrrell, a college friend of Locke’s and later an influential Whig thinker and writer.
“puzzled…perplexed”: Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Epistle to the Reader, 7.
“To explicate by subtle hints”: Regarding this poem A. E. Shipley observes, “Butler did not appreciate what even in these days is not always appreciated, that the minute investigation of subjects and objects which to the ordinary man seem trivial and vain often lead to discoveries of the profoundest import to mankind.” A. E. Shipley, “The Progress of Science,” in A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, vol. 8 (New York: Putnam, 1907–21), online edition copyright 2000 Bartleby.com, Inc., http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge (accessed December 28, 2004).
“The stage is too big for the drama”: Richard P. Feynman interviewed by Bill Stout, 1959, in Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (New York: Basic Books, 2006), appendix 1.
“philosophy is the misuse of a terminology”: Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, no. I (February 1960). Wigner attributes it to W. Dubislav, Die Philosophie der Mathematik in der Gegenwart (Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt Verlag, 1932), 1.
“We should not then perhaps be so forward”: Locke, Essay, IV, 22.
“All true science begins with empiricism”: Nature, no. 615 (1881), 343.
“undervalue the advantages of our knowledge”: Ibid., 46.
“What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth”: Richard P. Feynman to the editor of the California Tech, February 27, 1976.
“The extent of knowledge…is so vast”: Locke, journal entry made in France in 1677; in Bourne, Life of Locke, vol. 1, 360. An entry in Locke’s commonplace book dated 1671 gives an impression of the slipperiness of the term “ideas”: “I imagine that all knowledge is founded on, and ultimately derives itself from, sense or something analogous to it, and may be called sensation, which is done by our senses conversant about particular objects, which gives us the simple ideas or images of things, and thus we come to have ideas of heat and light, hard and soft, which are nothing but the reviving again in our minds these imaginations which those objects, when they affected our senses, caused in us, whether by motion or otherwise it matters not here to consider; and thus we do when we conceive heat or light, yellow or blue, sweet or bitter. And therefore I think that those things which we call sensible qualities are the simplest ideas we have, and the first objects of our understanding.” Ibid., vol. II, 89.
rights such as liberty: Locke writes variously of “life, liberty, or estate,” and “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.” Jefferson’s phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” also echoes Locke, who referred to the “pursuit of our happiness.”
“the power a man has to do or forbear doing”: Locke, Essay, XXI, 15.
“Our understanding and reason were given us”: Locke, Essay, XXI, 24.
“As far as this power reaches”: Locke, Essay, XXI, 8.
“It is lawful for the people…to resist”: Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II.xix.232:437, Peter Laslett, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
“I have seen parents so heap rules on their children”: Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1692, sec. 65.
“blank slate”: If, for instance, we envision the brain as akin to a binary computer, then our neuroanatomy might be compared to the central processing unit (CPU) and the firmware in a personal computer when we first take it out of the box: The computer’s subsequent “experiences” soon make it unique, but its CPU and its firmware determine the fundamentals of what it can do. For a discussion see, e.g., Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002).
as natural as fish find water: As John Stuart Mill observed, “The book which has changed the face of a science, even when not superseded in its doctrines, is seldom suitable for didactic purposes. It is adapted to the state of mind, not of those who are ignorant of every doctrine, but of those who are instructed in an erroneous doctrine. So far as it is taken up with directly combating the errors which prevailed before it was written, the more completely it has done its work, the more certain it is of becoming superfluous….” Mill, “Professor Sedgwick’s Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge,” London Review, April 1835.
“the Age of Paine”: John Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, October 29, 1805.
“the friend of human rights”: James Monroe to Thomas Paine, September 18, 1794.
“free America without her Thomas Paine”: Thomas Paine Readers Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1, Fall 1997, 5.
“Is it a greater miracle”: William Blake, Annotations to “An Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine by R. Watson,” in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Blake: Complete Writings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 391.
“It was read by public men”: John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 112, who references George W. Corner, The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 114–15; and see Rush to James Cheetham, Philadelphia, July 17, 1809.
“Every living man in America…who could read”: Elbert Hubbard, “A Little Journey to the Home of Thomas Paine,” in Daniel Edwin Wheeler, ed., Life and Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Vincent Parke, 1908), vol. 1, 312.
“in a rage when our affairs were at their lowest ebb”: Keane, Paine, 143, referencing the Pennsylvania Journal; and the Weekly Advertiser, December 19, 1776.
“I think the game is pretty near up”: Kenneth Nebenzahl, ed., and Don Higginbotham, Atlas of the American Revolution (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1975), 99.
“Victory or Death”: Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 322.
“These are the times that try men’s souls”: Paine, The American Crisis, Number 1, December 19, 1776, 1.
“as much effect as any man living”: Jefferson to Paine, March 18, 1801.
“never been grasped in their full complexity”: Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), xii.
“Love abhors clamor and soon flies away”: Paine, “Reflections on Unhappy Marriages,” Pennsylvania Magazine, June 1775.
“very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man”: Benjamin Franklin to his son-in-law Richard Bache, September 30, 1774, in Keane, Paine, 84.
“I am led to this reflection by the present domestic state of America”: Paine (writing as “Atlanticus”), “Useful and Entertaining Hints,” Pennsylvania Magazine, February 1775; italics in original.
“all destroyed—at least all which the General had”: Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, with a History of His Literary, Political and Religious Career in America, France, and England (New York: Putnam, 1893), vol. 1, xix–xx, http://www.thomaspaine.org/bio/ConwayLife.html.
“the natural bent of my mind was to science”: Paine, Age of Reason, Part 1, Section 11.
“by unwearied application (without a master)”: E. Henderson, Life of James Ferguson, F. R. S. (London: A. Fullerton, 1867), 450.
“grounded on demonstration”: Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language [London, 1755] (Delray Beach, FL: Levinger, 2002), 455.
“I purchased a pair of globes”: W. E. Woodward, Tom Paine: America’s Godfather 1737–1809 (New York: Dutton, 1945), 30.
“the use of the Globes…is the first consideration”: Benjamin Martin, “The Description and Use of Both the Globes, the Armillary Sphere, and Orrery” (London: Self-published, 1758).
“like a bubble or a balloon in the air”: Paine, The Age of Reason, Part 1, Eric Foner, ed., in Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 705.
“as our system of worlds does round our central Sun”: Ibid., 708.
“every tree, every plant, every leaf”: Ibid., 704.
“There is room for millions of worlds”: Ibid., 705.
“The same universal school of science presents itself to all”: Ibid., 709; see also Marjorie Nicolson, “Thomas Paine, Edward Nares, and Mrs. Piozzi’s Marginalia,” Huntington Library Bulletin, no. 10 (1936), 113.
“no disposition for what is called politics”: Ibid., 701.
“I took the idea of constructing it from a spider’s web”: Paine to Sir George Staunton, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 10, 231.
“Each of us had a roll of cartridge paper”: Paine, “The Cause of the Yellow Fever,” in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 1, 310–11.
“breeding grounds for a new radical politics”: Keane, Paine, 45.
“a silly, contemptible thing”: Paine, Rights of Man, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 1, 260.
“The state of a king shuts him from the world”: Paine, Common Sense, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 1, 8.
“a banditti of ruffians”: Paine, Rights of Man, 2:2, in Foner, Paine, 556.
“never traces government to its source”: Paine, Rights of Man, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 4, 147.
“to trump up some superstitious tale”: Paine, Common Sense, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 2, 21.
“All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny”: Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2, in Foner, Paine, 559.
“As the republic of letters brings forward the best”: Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2, in Foner, Paine, 563.
“Such governments consider man merely as an animal”: Paine, Agrarian Justice, in Foner, Paine, 410. The phrase italicized by Paine is a quotation from a speech to Parliament by Bishop Samuel Horsley, a Tory.
“No one man is capable…of supplying his own wants”: Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2, 1, in Foner, Paine, 551.
“All the great laws of society are laws of nature”: Paine, Rights of Man, in Foner, Paine, 553.
“liberally opened a temple where all may meet”: Paine, “Letter to the Abbe Raynal,” 1782, http://ideas.repec.org/h/hay/hetcha/paine1908-99.html.
“make the best of life”: Ibid.
“the quiet field of science”: Paine to George Clymer, December 13, 1786.
“an ingenious, honest man”: Keane, Paine, 271.
“every thing in it that constitutes the idea of a miracle”: Paine, Age of Reason, Part I, in Foner, Paine, 714.
“Every thing is a miracle”: Paine, Age of Reason, Part I, in Foner, Paine, 713.
“You see the absurdity of monarchical governments”: Keane, Paine, 313.
“mistakes are likely enough to be committed”: Keane, Ibid., 315.
“I saw my life in continual danger”: Paine to Samuel Adams, January 1, 1803; in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 6, 301.
“running headlong into atheism”: Ibid.
“postpone it to the latter part of my life”: Keane, Paine, 390.
“To believe that God created a plurality of worlds”: Paine, Age of Reason, Part 1, in Foner, Paine, 704.
“in an endless succession of death”: Paine, Age of Reason, Part 1, in Foner, Paine, 710.
“how happened it that he did not discover America?”: Paine, Age of Reason, Part 1, in Foner, Paine, 716.
“revolutions cannot be made with rosewater”: Keane, Paine, 381.
“I have been less fortunate, but not less innocent”: Ibid., 408.
“what rendered the scene more horrible”: Ibid., 412.
“a very funny, witty, old man”: Ibid., 449.
“I have lived an honest and useful life”: Ibid., 533.
“The principles of science lead to this knowledge”: Paine, Age of Reason, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 6, 277.
“The Bible represents God to be a changeable, passionate, vindictive Being”: Paine, “Letters Concerning the ‘Age of Reason’: An Answer to a Friend,” Paris, May 12, 1797, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 6, 290.
“That which is now called natural philosophy”: Age of Reason: Part I, in Foner, Paine, 691.
“The study of theology…is the study of nothing”: Age of Reason, in Wheeler, Life and Writings, vol. 6, 276–77.
a “better Christian”: William Blake, Milton E140; and in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Complete Writings of William Blake (London: Nonesuch, 1957), 396.
“filthy little atheist”: Theodore Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 289; in Keane, Paine, 323.
CHAPTER FIVE: AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
“a science of the very first order”: Thomas Jefferson to David Williams, November 14, 1803.
American Indian vocabularies: Jefferson viewed the American Indians as living in a state of nature and having “no law but that of Nature” Jefferson to John Manners, June 12, 1817. He wondered whether studying Indian societies might adduce evidence supporting the liberal assertion that human equality is based in nature’s laws. Jefferson divided societies into three kinds—those governed by force; by the people, as in England and the United States; and those “without government as among our Indians” Jefferson to James Madison, January 30, 1787. He frequently expressed sympathy for the Indians (“those much-injured people”) and ranked the oratory of their greatest speakers with that “of Demosthenes and Cicero” Notes on the State of Virginia, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 188. The bulk of Jefferson’s papers on American Indian vocabulary were, however, destroyed by thieves who ransacked his baggage.
“I would wish to form them into a knot on the same canvas”: Jefferson to Richard Pric, January 8, 1789.
“sure knowledge”: Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query VI. 90 the solar eclipse of September 17, 1811: Jefferson to Paine Todd, October 10, 1811. Computer analysis by T.F., September 16, 2004.
“Science is my passion, politics my duty”: Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 1. By the word “science,” Jefferson and his contemporaries meant something both broader and rather different from what we mean by the word today, though the differences are not so daunting as a few scholars have claimed. It is true that Jefferson sometimes employed the term “science” to mean any sort of well-founded knowledge, as when he wrote, “All the branches, then, of useful science, ought to be taught in the general schools, to a competent degree, in the first instance. These sciences may be arranged into three departments, not rigorously scientific, indeed, but sufficiently so for our purposes. These are, 1. language; 2, mathematics; 3, philosophy.” But more often he meant what he called “real science,” such as the study of “arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and natural history.” Saul K. Padover, A Jefferson Profile as Revealed in His Letters (New York: John Day, 1956), 239, 304.
“the most flattering incident of my life”: Jefferson to the secretary of the APS, January 28, 1797. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier later credited Jefferson with discovering this ice-age ground sloth, known today as Megalonyx jeffersonii.
“abandoning the rich and declining their dinners”: Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 1800; in I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers (New York: Norton, 1995), 63–4. Jefferson kept to this resolve so assiduously that twelve years later, at an inaugural ball honoring the induction of James Madison as his successor to the presidency, Jefferson felt obliged to inquire whether he’d arrived too early and to otherwise ask advice on how properly to behave.
“attacked…by your excellency’s ram”: William Keough to Thomas Jefferson, February 15, 1809.
“Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science”: Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, March 2, 1809.
“laws of nature”: The term “law” became a scientific metaphor (planets “obey” Newtonian “laws” of motion) and then came full circle when Enlightenment thinkers argued that scientifically identified natural laws revealed a universal order to which human society could conform.
“sacred and undeniable”: John Adams also reviewed Jefferson’s draft, but the handwriting of this editorial alteration appears to be Franklin’s.
science…founded on “self-evident principles”: Joseph Priestley’s A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism was not published until 1777, but he had been delivering the lectures since 1762, and his friend Jefferson would have been familiar with his thinking in this regard. John Harris’s Lexicon technicum, or an universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, the first alphabetical encyclopedia in English, was originally published in London in 1704; this excerpt appears in Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, 123.
“every single Argument should be managed as a Mathematical Demonstration”: For Locke on the self-evident, see his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter VII.
“turned to neither book nor pamphlet”: For Locke see William Samuel Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vol. 18, no. 4 (October 1961), 483. Jefferson at age 77 recalled that “Richard H. Lee charged it as copied from Locke’s treatise on Government…. I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it.” Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 25. Regardless of whether this recollection, decades after the fact, is entirely accurate, Jefferson did draw—whether from the page or from his prodigious memory—on a number of sources, ranging from the ancient Greeks to Thomas Paine. Clear influences include Jefferson’s own draft for the Virginia constitution, which he had just written and from which he cribbed many of the grievances against King George, and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted by the Virginia Constitutional Convention on June 12, 1776. Written by the Virginia planter George Mason and destined to form the basis of the Bill of Rights, the Virginia Declaration expresses similar Lockean sentiments, in something like the same language that Jefferson employed in Philadelphia. It begins by asserting “that all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights…namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Jefferson esteemed Mason as “one of our really great men, and of the first order of greatness” (Jefferson to Augustus B. Woodward, April 3, 1825) and never claimed that anything in the Declaration of Independence was original: “I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.” Becker, ibid.
“a man profound in most of the useful branches of science”: Jefferson, Autobiography, third paragraph. Hired to teach natural philosophy, which he defined as being made up of “Physicks, Metaphysicks, and Mathematicks,” Small was also enlisted to teach moral philosophy, which the college defined as comprised of “Rhetorick, Logick, and Ethicks.” He applied modern scientific and mathematical precepts to both, taking to heart the William and Mary charter, which advised that the faculty need not follow “Aristotle’s Logick and Physicks, which reigned so long alone in the Schools” but were free to “teach what Systems…they think fit.” William Samuel Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vol. 18, no. 4 (October 1961), 472.
“Every creature possessed of reason and liberty is accountable for his actions”: William Duncan, The Elements of Logic (New York: Nichols, 1802), 126, 131.
“given added persuasive power”: William Samuel Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vol. 18, no. 4 (October 1961), 465.
“applicable to all men and all times”: Lincoln, address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, February 22, 1861.
the Library of Congress: Jefferson was paid only a fraction of the books’ worth by Congress. His comments on the “sublime luxury” of reading, e.g., “Homer in his own language” are from a letter to Joseph Priestley, January 27, 1800.
submarines armed with torpedoes: The world’s first military submarine, the Turtle, was constructed as a school science project at Yale by the inventor David Bushnell and deployed against the British flagship Eagle during its blockade of New York harbor in August 1776. The one-man craft successfully navigated to a point beneath the Eagle but was unable to affix a bomb to the ship’s copper-shielded hull.
“degrading the Almighty”: Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I; in Eric Foner, ed., Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 715.
“a delicious luxury indeed”: Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, March 12, 1799.
“the most extraordinary collection of talent”: Washington Post, April 30, 1962, B5; Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 384. The dinner was held on April 29, 1962. As a few academics have fallen victim to a habit of disparaging Kennedy’s intellect generally, and of assuming that this toast in particular is to be credited to his speechwriters, it should be noted that the original, preserved at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., shows Kennedy’s own hand crossing out the toast written for him and writing two discarded alternates—presumably on his knee while at the banquet—before inscribing the one he delivered.
“Is it best to have the sliders…a little circular?”: Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 196.
“I knew there was as much love of science…”: Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, 196.
“Oh that I had devoted to Newton”: John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 3, 1812.
“a man who never said a foolish thing in his life”: http://www.rogersherman.net (accessed August 31, 2004).
Franklin…soothed Jefferson’s temper: As Jefferson recalled it, “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations. ‘I have made it a rule,’ said he, ‘whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughts-man of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you. When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words, “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,” with a figure of a hat subjoined; but he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word “Hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which show he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats!” says his next friend. “Why nobody will expect you to give them away, what then is the use of that word?” It was stricken out, and “hats” followed it, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So the inscription was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson” with the figure of a hat subjoined.’” Jefferson to Robert Walsh, December 4, 1818.
“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire”: Madison, Federalist, No. 10, 55.
“The Parliament is the heart”: James Harrington, Oceana, http://www.constitution.org/jh/oceana.htm (accessed September 6, 2004).
“North-America is become a new primary planet”: Thomas Pownall to Adam Smith, September 25, 1776; see Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies (London: Wilkie, 1764), 32–33.
“The progress of science”: Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812.
social mobility: Inasmuch as some revisionist historians having sought to portray the American founders as English-style aristocrats who were hypocritical in proclaiming a love of learning and liberty, it may be worth pointing out that, as the historian Gordon S. Wood notes, “By English standards American aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson, even with hundreds of slaves, remained minor gentry at best [while] lawyers like Adams and Hamilton were even less distinguished.” From an English standpoint America resembled Scotland, in that both states “tended to be dominated by minor gentry—professional men and relatively small landowners—who were anxious to have their status determined less by their ancestry or the size of their estates and more by their character or their learning.” As Wood notes, “Almost all the revolutionary leaders—even including the second and third ranks of leadership—were first-generation gentlemen. That is to say, almost all were the first in their families to attend college, to acquire a liberal arts education, and to display the new eighteenth-century marks of an enlightened gentleman. Of the ninety-nine men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution only eight are known to have had fathers who attended college.” Gordon S. Wood, “The Greatest Generation,” New York Review of Books, March 29, 2001, 17–22. See also “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vol. 11, April 1954, 200–213.
“Once works of the intelligence became sources of power”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, introduction, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (New York: Library of America, 2004), 5.
“Although democracy does not encourage men to cultivate science for its own sake”: Ibid., 527.
slavery…was explicitly protected by the Constitution: The Enumeration Clause of the Constitution apportioned congressional representatives under a formula, negotiated between northern and southern states, that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person. Article 1, Section 9 barred Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves until the year 1808. The Fugitive Slave Clause (IV, 2) required that persons “held to service in one state, under the laws thereof…shall be delivered up on the claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
“How is it…that the loudest YELPS for liberty come from the drivers of Negroes?”: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Chapter XLII, 1777–1778. Many Americans expressed similar sentiments at the time. John Jay, a Federalist author, noted in 1786 that “to contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.” Patrick Henry in 1773 expressed his hope that “an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.” Shortly after signing the Constitution, Oliver Ellsworth wrote that “all good men wish the entire abolition of slavery.”
“revengeful and cruel”: Franklin, “A Conversation on Slavery,” Public Advertiser, January 30, 1770.
“Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America?”: Franklin, “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” 1751, in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 152.
“a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race”: Franklin to John Waring, December 17, 1763.
those “who alone in this land of freedom are degraded”: Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Petition to Congress, February 12, 1790. The elder Franklin wrote biting attacks on slavery; see, e.g., his “An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage” (1789); “Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks” (~1789); and “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade” (1790). The last of these, a satire published as an anonymous letter to the editor of the Federal Gazette, invents a Muslim slaveowner of old who protests that if the Christian slaves of Algiers were freed, the economy would suffer and the slaves themselves would be deprived of proper religious instruction.
“vehement philippic against Negro slavery”: Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 212.
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just”: Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18. Jefferson adds, a few lines later, “I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present [i.e., American] revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”
“I am happy to be able to inform you”: Jefferson to Condorcet, August 30, 1791. Jefferson’s political opponents assailed both his “thus fraternizing with Negroes,” as one put it, and his expressions of sympathy for the Indians: “When we see him employed…to establish that the body of the American savage is not inferior in form or in vigor to the body of an European…how much more solicitous may we suppose him to have been to prove that the mind of this savage was also [well formed]?” sputtered Luther Martin, the attorney general of Maryland. Then as now, those determined to fault Jefferson can always find reasons to call him a racist when he displayed anything less than a modern liberal sensibility, while branding him a hypocrite when he was being fair and open-minded. See Bedini, Jefferson, 224, 278–79.
“We have the wolf by the ear”: Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820.
“another Peloponnesian war”: Jefferson to John Adams, January 22, 1821.
“the best man living”: Pennsylvania Journal, February 19, 1777, in David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 428. Jefferson said of Washington, with whom he had quarreled bitterly, “His person, you know, was fine.”
“I wish from my soul”: Washington to Lawrence Lewis, his future son-in-law, August 1797.
“to see some plan adopted”: John Rhodehamel, The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 97.
“This may seem a contradiction”: John Bernard, Retrospections of America, 1797–1811 (New York: Harper, 1887), in Richard Norton Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 305–6.
“and I do moreover most pointedly”: Washington, Last Will and Testament, July 9, 1799.
“No experiment can be more interesting”: Jefferson to John Tyler, 1804.
“arises as well from the object itself”: James Madison, Federalist No. 37, No. 38, January 12, 1788, in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 235, 241.
“planets…fly from their orbits”: I. B. Cohen notes that, while the Constitution can be regarded as a Newtonian document, the founders and some of the latter-day academics who have pursued this line of inquiry have, through an inadequate command of Newton’s work, got it a bit muddled. For a discussion see Supplement 2 to Cohen’s Science and the Founding Fathers, 283ff.
a botanical analogy: The duality between those who view the Constitution as comparable to mechanistic physics and those who prefer to think of it in terms of the life sciences has proved enduring. James Russell Lowell in 1888 described the founders as having “invented a machine that would go of itself” and Woodrow Wilson in 1912 compared the Constitution to a mechanical model of the solar system. On the other side the journalist Amos K. Fiske contributed a long essay to the New York Times in 1900 titled, “The Constitution: An Organism Not a Mechanism,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1914 declared that “the provisions of the Constitution…are organic living institutions,” and Felix Frankfurter in 1915 asserted that “the Constitution is an organism.” Inevitably, some writers mixed their metaphors. In the 1880s the prominent attorney George Ticknor Curtis referred to the “necessity of organic laws to supply the machinery of the new government,” and James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain’s favorite example of a writer whose tangled style confuses even himself, managed in a single sentence to envision the “fruits” politicians could produce were the nation not in a “harness” that had something to do—Cooper becomes a bit obscure here—with advancing “the great national car.” For a discussion, see Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1986).
“Without the Constitution and the Union”: Lincoln, unpublished fragment, in Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, 16.
“I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve”: Franklin to the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787; text from James Madison’s notes. Italics added. Franklin, over eighty years old and only two years from the end of his life, was too feeble to speak himself, so his remarks were read on his behalf by his fellow Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson.
“Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge”: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 27.
“Science is a kind of open laboratory for a democracy”: Lee Smolin, “Loop Quantum Gravity,” Edge, 112, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_ index.html, posted February 24, 2003 (accessed September 20, 2004).
“I tried to explain that…there are supposed to be votes”: Richard P. Feynman, lecture at the University of Washington, 1963, published as The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1998), 101. As the text is based on the transcription of an extemporaneous lecture, its punctuation has been modified here for clarity’s sake.
“The government of the United States was developed”: Ibid., 49.
“If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world”: This story comes from the American artist Benjamin West, who counted among his students Washington’s best-known portraitist, Gilbert Stuart. West claimed that King George, believing that West understood Washington’s character, asked him what Washington would do if the Americans won the war, to which West responded by predicting that Washington would relinquish all his political power. This story has never been verified and in some respects sounds too good to be true, but the often ridiculed George III was capable of penetrating insights. In the audience he gave on June 2, 1785, to John Adams, formerly condemned as a treasonous traitor but now welcomed as the former colonies’ first ambassador to England, George said, according to Adams: “I wish you Sir, to believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late Contest, but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do, by the Duty which I owed to my People. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the Separation, but the Separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the Friendship of the United States as an independent Power.” See David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 335–337.
“the success of the experiment”: Washington, State of the Union address, December 7, 1796.
“Is there a doubt?…Let experience solve it”: Washington’s Farewell Address was published in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser and the Gazette of the United States on September 19, 1796. Based on a draft written by Alexander Hamilton four years earlier, it reads today as perhaps a bit prolix, weighing in at over six thousand words and ignoring its own advice, in the sixth paragraph, that, “Here, perhaps, I ought to stop.” Nevertheless it became an article of democratic scripture, read aloud annually in the House of Representatives for two centuries thereafter. As was usually the case with Washington, though, what mattered were less his words than his deeds.
“newspapers without a government”: Jefferson to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787.
the emergence of political parties: The two principal parties of the day were the Federalists, centered on Alexander Hamilton and favoring a strong national government, and the Anti-Federalists (sometimes called Republicans), who rallied around Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian union where the states held most of the power. Weakened by Hamilton’s death in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, the Federalist party had petered out by about 1825, while the Republicans, confusingly enough, evolved into today’s Democratic Party. The modern Republican Party originated in 1854, in part as an alliance of abolitionists and suffragettes, and won the White House with Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860.
“fathered children by one of his slaves”: One of Jefferson’s libelers—Harry Croswell, of Hudson, New York, whose Wasp specialized in lampooning the powerful—was put on trial for printing that Jefferson had paid another journalist to accuse George Washington of treason, thievery, and perjury. Alexander Hamilton defended Croswell by pleading that evidence bearing on the truth or falsehood of the libel should be introduced at the trial. It was not, but Hamilton’s plea was so effective that the New York state legislature promptly enacted a statute to that effect, establishing the “Hamilton doctrine”—that truth is an absolute defense against libel actions. While in Albany for the trial, Hamilton in the course of a casual conversation made derogatory remarks about Aaron Burr; this led to the duel in which Hamilton was killed. Theirs was one of several “newspaper duels,” in that each combatant was championed by his own newspaper—Burr by Washington Irving’s New York Morning Chronicle, Hamilton by the Evening Post—a circumstance that enhanced their notoriety while turning them into what amounted to action figures in a lurid melodrama played out for circulation dollars. The charge that Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings continues to resurface, bolstered by a 1998 DNA test indicating a link between the Jefferson and Hemings family lines. For a recent study of this fascinating question, see Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 1998.
“I have lent myself willingly as the subject of a great experiment”: Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, February 11, 1807.
“The experiment has been tried”: Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805.
“The press, confined to truth”: Ibid.
“I offer to our country sincere congratulations”: Ibid. Similarly, Abraham Lincoln based the Gettysburg Address on the concept that liberal democracy was an experimental system now undergoing a particularly agonizing empirical test: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”
“every man of science feels a strong and disinterested desire of promoting it”: Jefferson to Marc Auguste Pictet, February 5, 1803. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “The Americans did not rely on the nature of the country to counter the dangers arising from their constitution and political laws. To ills that they share with all democratic peoples they applied remedies that had previously occurred to no one else; and, though they were the first to try those remedies, they succeeded.” Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, part 2, chapter 9, Goldhammer trans.
“An insurrection has consequently begun”: Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813.
“shrink from the advance of truth and science”: Jefferson to John Manners, 1814.
“There is not a truth existing which I fear”: Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1826.
“All eyes are opened”: Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826.
“I love you with all my heart”: Jefferson to Adams, August 15, 1820.
CHAPTER SIX: THE TERROR
“Madame Deficit”: The government’s financial distress was due not to the profligacy of its queen but to its having financed the war entirely through debt. The one thing that students still learn about Marie Antoinette—that when informed that the peasants were starving because they could no longer afford to buy bread, she flippantly replied, “Let them eat cake”—is false. The tale appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, where it is attributed to “a great princess,” but Rousseau was writing in 1766, when Marie was ten years old and living in Austria. A teenager when she married and came to France, Marie wrote to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, that on her entrance into Paris on June 14, 1773, “What touched me most…was the tenderness and earnestness of the poor people, who, in spite of the taxes with which they are overwhelmed, were transported with joy at seeing us. When we went to walk in the Tuileries, there was so vast a crowd that we were three-quarters of an hour without being able to move either forward or backward. The dauphin and I gave repeated orders to the Guards not to beat any one, which had a very good effect…. What a happy thing it is for persons in our rank to gain the love of a whole nation so cheaply. Yet there is nothing so precious; I felt it thoroughly, and shall never forget it.”
“the most unexampled success…this great crisis being now over”: Jefferson to Madison, May 11, 1789; Jefferson to Jay, June 29, 1789.
“all danger of civil commotion here is at an end”: Jefferson to John Trumbull, June 29, 1789.
“Tranquility is well established in Paris”: Jefferson to Paine, September 13, 1789. One wonders what so clouded Jefferson’s crystal ball. It may be that he was isolated from contact with more than a small circle of French friends. Although he read and wrote French, Jefferson did not speak it with the eloquence to which he was accustomed, and he seems to have shrunk from the raised eyebrows that his unpolished spoken French might have aroused; nor was he much given to society gatherings in any language. Absent such conversations he evidently relied excessively on the advice of his friend General Lafayette, who shared in the prevailing American optimism about the French revolutionary cause.
“to change the general way of thinking”: Arthur M. Wilson, “Encyclopédie,” in Paul Edwards, ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 2, 506.
“All things must be examined”: Diderot, encyclopedia entry for the word Encylopédie, in Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), 18.
“Philosophers were engaged in a winning battle”: William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 52.
“I have not the least doubt”: Paine to Washington, May 1, 1790.
“the most famous and the most respected of antiquity”: Keane, Tom Paine, 250.
quadrupled the annual rate of science book publication: The modern French historian Daniel Roche calls eighteenth-century popularization of science “the most important intellectual phenomenon of the time.” Roche, France in the Enlightenment, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 508.
The marvelous mathematical clockwork: Véron de Forbonnais, for one, attempted in the Encyclopédie to draw God, nature, and human sociability together into one pleasing web: “Infinite Providence…sought, through the variety it established in nature, to make men dependent on one another. The Supreme Being bound nation to nation in such a way as to preserve the peace and promote love for one another, and also, by filling the universe with marvels, to garner their praise by demonstrating his greatness and his love for all.” Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 42.
“invented nothing…set everything on fire”: Mme de Staël, in Will and Ariel Durant, Rousseau and Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 887. And she admired Rousseau!
“Uneducated, he wrote the most influential book”: John Herman Randall Jr., The Career of Philosophy, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 964.
“the most sociable and loving of men”: Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Peter France, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1979), 27.
“she was present in my mind”: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), 685. Russell observes that Rousseau “considered that he always had a warm heart, which, however, never hindered him from base actions towards his best friends.”
“The physical wants which were satisfied”: Rousseau, Confessions, Book IX. From 1755 Rousseau was unable to continue having sexual relations, owing to a disorder of the urinary tract. He saw the transformation as yet another tribute to his personal merit: “From that moment I became virtuous.”
“deceitful, vain as Satan”: Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 27.
“an inconsequential poor pygmy of a man”: Durant, Rousseau and Revolution, 165.
“Rousseau is…a Rascal”: Adam Smith to David Hume, July 6, 1766.
“entertained no principle”: Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 690.
“my odd, romantic notions”: Biographical note to Rousseau’s A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 319.
“I see him satisfying his hunger at the first oak”: Rousseau, Origin of Inequality, 336, 334. In fairness to Rousseau it should be noted than many other writers have fallen victim to bucolic romances—among them Virgil, who in his Georgics (2.458) describes “how lucky farmers are” since the earth provides them with “an easy living from the soil.” From what is known of Virgil’s life it appears unlikely that he ever worked on a farm for so much as a day in his life.
“Let us begin then by laying facts aside”: Randall, Career of Philosophy, vol. 1, 968.
“I hate books”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, Alan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 184.
“have true ideas”: Rousseau, “The Social Contract and Discourses,” in Randall, Career of Philosophy, vol. 1, 967. 117 “Man is naturally good”: Rousseau, “Discourse on Inequality,” 1754, in Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 687.
“The first man”: Rousseau, Origin of Inequality, 348.
“The worst mistake in the history of the human race”: Jared Diamond, in “Noble or Savage?” The Economist, December 22, 2007, 129.
the results do not look like Eden: For critiques of the notion that early man was peaceable, see Steven A. LeBlanc with Katherine E. Register, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Noble Savage and a Peaceful Past (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003) and Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). An ecological explanation of the high rate of violent mortality among youthful males may be that these societies lacked sufficient nutrition to otherwise support their expanding numbers. The Tasaday hoax was exposed in large part by scientists—among them an archeologist who saw from photos that the “stone age” people’s stone axes were obvious fakes, and an anthropologist who noted that their alleged cave dwellings lacked “middens,” or garbage heaps normally found in such situations if people have actually been living there.
indifferent to their environment: Cave painters in the south of France 32,000 years ago focused on rhinoceroses; 17,000 years later their subjects were bison, bulls, and horses—the rhinos presumably having all been eaten. This testimony would appear to be firsthand, if, as seems likely, the painters were mostly youthful males; see R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Although climate change or some other phenomenon rather than hunting may have been responsible for these wildlife depredations, it remains the case that little evidence supports the romantic assumption that prehistoric humans practiced much environmental stewardship. This is not to say that they did not love and revere the world or find it beautiful, but stewardship requires more than a motive. If, for instance, you wish to limit the hunting of the wildebeest, it is not sufficient that your one tribe does so: Neighboring tribes will simply kill the wildebeest you spared. So your campaign to save the wildebeest requires alliances with, or dominion over, your neighbors—whereupon you are on the road toward civilization.
“my face [is] almost as well known as that of the moon”: Gordon S. Wood, “Founders & Keepers,” The New York Review of Books, July 14, 2005, 35.
“a living advertisement for the virtues of Rousseauistic simplicity”: Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 63.
“a scene of continual dissipation”: Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 352.
“Throwing aside…all those scientific books,”: Rousseau, Origin of Inequality, Preface; Randall, Career of Philosophy, vol. 1, 968.
“men like me…can no longer subsist”: Randall, Career of Philosophy, vol. 1, 969.
120 “forced to be free”: Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 1, Chapter 7, “The Sovereign.” Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (New York: Faber, 1999), 62. Italics added.
“Divine man!”: Durant, Rousseau and Revolution, 890.
“the fundamental principle”: Robespierre, “On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy,” speech of February 5, 1794.
“What is the end of our revolution?”: Robespierre, “Report upon the Principles of Political Morality,” Paul Halsall, trans. Internet Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1794robespierre.html (accessed February 17, 2005).
121 “Truth and reason alone”: Robespierre, speech of May 16, 1791, in Dunn, Sister Revolutions, 117.
“I abhor any kind of government that includes factious men”: Robespierre, July 14, 1791, in Dunn, Sister Revolutions, 88.
“The duty of journalists”: Jean-Paul Bertaud, “An Open File: The Press Under the Terror,” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (New York: Elsevier, 1994), 301.
“to lead the people by reason”: Robespierre, “On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy,” Paul Halsall, trans. Modern History Sourcebook, from http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/french/french.html (accessed January 19, 2005).
“conspirators…assassins”: Robespierre, “Report upon the Principles of Political Morality Which Are to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Interior Concerns of the Republic,” Paul Halsall, trans. Modern History Sourcebook, from http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/french/french.html (accessed January 19, 2005).
“already been judged”: Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 194.
“I now relinquish that hope”: Paine to Jefferson, April 20, 1793.
“painted the charms of virtue in strokes of fire”: Jean Starobinski, “Rousseau and Revolution,” New York Review of Books, April 25, 2002, 59.
“to suspend a penalty over each action”: Keith Michael Baker, introduction to Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4 (New York: Elsevier, 1994), xiiv.
“I met but outrages”: Marat to Roume de Saint-Laurent, November 20, 1783.
“I am maybe the only author beyond suspicion”: Marat, “Denunciation Against Mr. Necker, First Minister of Finances, made by Mr. Marat, the Friend of the People, in presence of the Public’s Court,” http://seni.club.fr/life_of_marat.html (accessed January 20, 2005).
“cowardly murderers”: Ibid.
Law of Suspects: Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 251.
“the blood of those who had been executed”: Ibid., 254.
“It only took them an instant to cut off that head”: Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York: Free Press, 2002), 145.
“Let anyone be a savant”: Charles Coulston Gillispie, “Science in the French Revolution.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), vol. 45, issue 5 (May 15, 1959), 681.
“theory of madness”: Dunn, Sister Revolutions, 35.
“reformers…divided into two groups”: Randall, Career of Philosophy, vol. 1, 684–85.
“Time will tell”: Starobinski, “Rousseau and Revolution,” p 55.
“put his country’s freedom on a sure basis”: Vincent Cronin, Napoleon (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 177.
“I haven’t been able to understand”: Ghita Ionescu, Opposition: Past and Present of a Political Institution (London: Watts, 1968), 59.
“If Washington had been a Frenchman”: Napoleon to Benjamin Constant, shortly before his defeat at the battle of Waterloo, in J. Christopher Herold, ed. and trans., The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 276; and J. Christopher Herold, The Age of Napoleon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 123.
“Search the unknown forests”: James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell (1793–1799) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 501. Chateaubriand was inclined to romanticize Washington a bit. The historian J. Christopher Herold notes that “when Chateaubriand saw Washington in Philadelphia in 1791, he was disappointed to see him riding in a coach; he had expected to find him behind a plow.” Herold, Age of Napoleon, 11.
“Infallibility not being the attribute of Man”: Washington, draft of his Farewell Address, in Dunn, Sister Revolutions, 127.
CHAPTER SEVEN: POWER
“Until they were satisfied that knowledge was money”: Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Earl N. Harbert, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1986), 53.
“Advances will be most frequent”: H. B. Phillips, “On the Nature of Progress,” American Scientist, October 1945, 253–59.
“be laughed at”: Strutt to the novelist Maria Edgworth, in Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.
“years after we had taken chemistry to guide us”: William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004), 123. Carnegie’s chemistry research enabled him to produce better steel. His principal management innovation was to keep his mills running around the clock even if to do so meant sometimes selling at a loss. “As manufacturing is carried on today, in enormous establishments with five or ten millions of dollars of capital invested and with thousands of workers, it costs the manufacturer much less to run at a loss per ton or per year than to check his production,” he wrote. “Stoppage would be serious indeed. The condition of cheap manufacture is running full.” Stuart Weems Bruchey, The Wealth of the Nation: An Economic History of the United States (New York: Harper, 1988), 123. Though reviled as a “robber baron,” Carnegie was a lifelong liberal and science devotee who gave away vast sums, favored estate taxes as “of all forms of taxation…the wisest,” and maintained that “the man who dies…rich, dies disgraced.’” Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth, 1889, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.html. His critics perpetuated the myth that the public libraries Carnegie financed were required to hang his portrait on the wall, as one would expect of a royal patron; actually, his only such stipulation was that the libraries bear an image of the sun along with the maxim, “Let There Be Light.”
“clamber over or plough through”: David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 153.
“quite delightful and strange beyond description”: Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 191.
“uneducated persons…It is not against railways”: Wordsworth, letter to the editor of the Morning Post, 1844, reprinted as a pamphlet the following year; in W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), vol. 3; also see Ernest de Selincourt, ed., Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (Oxford University Press, 1970), 156. Wordsworth later protested that he had no desire “to interfere with the innocent enjoyments of the poor, by preventing this district becoming accessible to them by a railway.” James Mulvihill, “Consuming Nature: Wordsworth and the Kendal and Windermere Railway Controversy.” Modern Language Quarterly 56(3):305–26 (September 1995). But he felt that appreciation of nature was about as rare as appreciation of poetry, about which he advised his patron Lady Beaumont, “It is an awful truth that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world.” Adam Kirsch, “Strange Fits of Passion,” New Yorker, December 5, 2005, 92. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in his Definitions of Poetry of 1836 declared that “poetry is opposed to science,” Wordsworth was not at his best when addressing technology. The politically reactionary William Butler Yeats would continue the tradition, dismissing scientific knowledge in unintentionally funny lines like these from his poem “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”:
Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass
“conquer space”: John C. Calhoun, 1817; Annals of Congress, 14th Congress, 2nd Session, 851–960. Calhoun, a congressman and senator from South Carolina, served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.
“Railroad iron is a magician’s rod”: Nye, America as Second Creation, 157. Railroad technology became a profitable export for Americans, who dispatched 162 locomotives and 2,700 freight and passenger cars to Russia alone. While the artist James McNeill Whistler was painting portraits of his mother, his father—an engineer—was working on the Russian railroads.
“I long to hear from you”: Samuel Morse to Lucretia Morse, February 10, 1825, in Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Walker, 1998), 25.
“severed the preexisting bond”: Robert Lucky, “The Quickening of Science Communication.” Science, vol. 289, issue 5477 (July 14, 2000): 259–64.
“Is it not a feat sublime?”: Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 39.
“removing causes of misunderstanding”: Standage, Victorian Internet, 90–91.
“know one another better”: Ibid., 104.
little more than a few clapboard buildings and unpaved streets: One such town was Norman, Oklahoma, where my maternal grandfather, Nelson MacCandless Crowe (1853–1920), arrived around 1890 to assume a teaching position at the newly founded University of Oklahoma. Norman was a creation of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, which in 1886–1887 built the town as an Indian Territory station site. Few lived there before the Great Land Run of 1889, when white settlers rushed in to claim “unassigned lands” in what had been Indian Territory. Crowe’s hopeful letters to his bride, who remained back east with their young daughter (my mother), were accompanied by photos of Norman’s few buildings, between which could be seen miles of starkly empty prairie receding to the horizon.
“in the West the railroad itself builds cities”: Horace Greeley et al., The Great Industries of the United States, 1872, in Nye, America as Second Creation, 157. Greeley, an abolitionist journalist, is best remembered for the injunction, “Go west, young man,” which he often repeated but did not invent.
each community regulated its own clocks: Solar observers being in short supply, methods for determining the local time were often rather informal, as expressed in the old joke about a small-town telephone operator who gets a call every weekday morning for years from a man asking for the correct time. Eventually, out of curiosity, she inquires why he keeps calling. “I’m the superintendent at the mill,” he informs her, “and I have to keep our clock accurate in order to blow the factory whistle at noon.” The operator laughs. “That’s funny,” she says. “For years, I’ve been setting my clock by your whistle.”
“There isn’t time”: High Noon, written by John W. Cunningham and Carl Foreman and directed by Fred Zinnemann, 1952.
“chagrined a little”: Franklin to Peter Collinson, April 29, 1749.
“my desire to escape from trade”: Michael Faraday, Life and Letters 1:54; from http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/chemistry/institutes/1992/Faraday.html (accessed January 30, 2005).135 “ALL THIS IS A DREAM”: James Hamilton, A Life of Discovery: Michael Faraday, Giant of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Random House, 2004), 334.
“No experiments are useless”: Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 51.
“You have the thing. Keep at it!”: Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. New York: Knopf, 2005, 42.
“You can’t have that much and drive a Ford”: Ibid., 259.
“Edison was enraptured”: Harold Evans, They Made America (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 159.
“suddenly came to me”: Ibid., 159–60.
“I speak without exaggeration”: Ronald W. Clark, Edison: The Man Who Made the Future (New York: Putnam’s, 1977), 90.
“In this business”: Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London: J. Johnson, 1776) http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta /priestley.html (accessed December 22, 2005).
“to make the dynamos, the lamps, the conductors”: Mitchell Wilson, American Science and Invention (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), 291.
“had to walk the streets”: Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 252.
“Sundown no longer emptied the promenade”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Plea for Gas Lamps,” in his Virginibus Puerisque, http://robert-louis-stevenson.classicliterature.co.uk/virginibus-puerisque/ebook-page-65.asp (accessed October 12, 2005).
“a symbol of infinity”: Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” in his The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Library of America: 1983), 1067. Adams adds that without the help of a technologically adept friend, he “might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way”—a touching reminder that in 1900 one could still look up from a city street in Paris and see the Milky Way. Electric lighting would soon put an end to that, at least until the day when campaigns against “light pollution” succeed in returning to cities the splendors of the night sky.
“Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things”: Nikola Tesla, My Inventions (Zagreb, Yugoslavia: Skolska Knjiga, 1977), ch. 3; http://modena.intergate.ca/personal/marcop/tesla/tesla.htm (accessed October 13, 2005). This odd little book was originally published in Electrical Experimenter, May, June, July, October, 1919. 138 “a fly alighting on a table”: Ibid.
“I must return to work”: John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: McKay, 1944), 49. For more on Tesla see Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003), ch. 4.
Einstein regarded authority: This is not to say that Einstein romanticized revolutionaries. Widely regarded as a “Red” in Germany following World War I, Einstein in November 1918 was invited to consult with leftist students who had formed a “soviet” and imprisoned the rector and deans at the University of Berlin. He declined, saying, “I have always thought that the German universities’ most valuable institution is academic freedom, whereby the lecturers are in no way told what to teach, and the students are able to choose which lectures to attend, without much supervision and control. Your new statutes seem to abolish all this and to replace it by precise regulations, I would be very sorry if the old freedom were to come to an end.” Max Born, The Born-Einstein Letters, Irene Born, trans. (New York: Walker, 1971), 150. For context see Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin (New York: Bantam, 2003), ch. 12.
“Something deeply hidden”: Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1969), vol. 1, 9.
“twins paradox”: For further discussion see “The Twin Paradox” Web site of the physicist John Baez, from whom I have borrowed the names of Terrence for the earthbound twin and Stella for the astronaut: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/TwinParadox/twin_paradox.html.
“clarify…‘time’”: Einstein, “On the Thermodynamics of Moving Bodies.” Annalen der Physik 17 (1905) 891–921, Anna Beck, trans., in John Stachel, ed., The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), English translation supplement., vol. 2, 140.
“Of the gods we believe”: Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Free Press, 1996), 5.105.2.
“The persistent effort of Europeans”: David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 10. Abernethy adds that “to the extent that non-European societies did not possess or value the explore-control-utilize syndrome, they were at a power disadvantage when encountering people who did. Where institutions and norms did not support scientific investigation and technological development, it was practically impossible to resist invaders who could call upon the latest round of advances generated by their home societies.” Ibid., 39.
142 “a right to interfere”: Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 28. Emphasis added.
“accompanied by misgivings”: Evelyn Baring, the first Earl of Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism, reprint of 1910 edition (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 19–20.
the British Empire alone dominated 444 million people: Great Britain in 1913 controlled nearly 32 million square kilometers of colonial lands, more than the next nine largest colonial powers combined and ten times that of the United States. As the political scientist David Abernethy notes, “Two-thirds of the United Nations’ member states as of January 2000—125 of 188—consisted of territories outside of Europe which at one time were governed by Europeans. Three-fifths of the world’s population live in countries whose entire territory has at one time been claimed by a European states. If one includes states portions of whose current territory were under the legal jurisdiction of Europeans—notably China, with its treaty ports—then in excess of 80 percent of human beings now living inhabit states that experienced some version of formal European rule. That rule lasted for more than 250 years in 37 U.N. member states and for more than a century in 60.” Abernethy, Dynamics of Global Dominance, 12–13. At the peak of the colonial era there were only 59 independent nations in the world; today, colonialism having waned, their number is approaching 200. Some 88 nations today, with a combined population of 2.3 billion, “list a west European tongue as an official language.” Ibid., 15. This is not to say that substantial numbers of the subjugated populations typically spoke the languages of the imperialist powers: prior to 1914, to take just one historical snapshot, it is estimated that only half of 1 percent of the world’s 300 million colonials were literate in a European language. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Random House, 1989), 202.
“Raw power…made a virtue in itself”: Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 759.
an enterprise that had begun in freedom devolved into freedom’s opposite: Americans, having begun as colonials themselves, were skeptical about colonialism. John Quincy Adams recalled expressing his exasperation at British colonial ambitions to Stratford Canning (1786–1880), the British minister to Washington, in 1821. “You claim India,” Adams fumed. “You claim Africa. You claim—” to which Canning urbanely interjected, “Perhaps a piece of the Moon?” “No, I have not heard that you claim exclusively any part of the Moon,” Adams replied. “But there is not a spot on this habitable globe that I could affirm you do not claim.” The Diary of John Quincy Adams 1794–1845, Allan Nevins, ed. (New York: Scribner, 1951), in Johnson, Birth of the Modern, 47.
turning trade into tyranny: Examples of old-style invasions of inlands as well as coastal cities included Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs in 1519 and Pizarro’s of the Incas in 1531, Spanish colonization of Luzon Island in the Philippines, the Dutch of Batavia in Java, Dutch and French Huguenots migrating into the interior of South Africa, and tax collection in Bengal by agents of the English East India Company. The more common pattern of controlling only coastal enclaves was found, among other places, in the trading ports of Luanda, Mombassa, and Malindi in Africa, and of Hormuz, Goa, Pondicherry, Madras, Calcutta, and Macao in Asia.
“How did a people who thought themselves free”: Simon Schama, “A History of Britain,” BBC television series, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/hob/index.shtml (accessed November 21, 2005).
“The Battas are not a bad people”: Johnson, Birth of the Modern, 345, 348–9. Raffles later expanded on his respect for the Battas, observing in his memoirs that they “have many virtues. I prize them highly. However horrible eating a man may sound in European ears, I question whether the party suffers so much, or the punishment itself is worse than the European tortures of two centuries ago. I have always doubted the policy, and even the right, of capital punishment among civilized nations; but this once admitted, and torture allowed, I see nothing more cruel in eating a man alive than in torturing him for days with mangled limbs and the like. Here they certainly eat him up at once, and the party seldom suffers more than a few minutes. It is probable that he suffers more pain from the loss of his ear than from what follows: indeed he is said to give one shriek when that is taken off, and then to continue silent till death.” C. E. Wurtzburg, Raffles of the Eastern Isles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
“Racism reared its head”: Although many European attitudes toward “exotic” peoples from distant lands were mind-bogglingly dehumanizing—as when, in 1904, several Samoan women were exhibited in the Hamburg zoo—others ranged from bewilderment to naïveté. Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux, who performed for Queen Victoria as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1887, reported that she requested an audience with the Sioux following the performance, and told them, “Today I have seen the best-looking people I know. If you belonged to me, I would not let them take you around in a show like this.” John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959), 188.
“Westward the course of empires”: Berkeley, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” in A. Fraser, ed., The Works of George Berkeley, D.D. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1901), vol. 4, 364. The technological historian David Nye notes that Berkeley’s dictum had a visual counterpart in an enormously popular Currier and Ives lithograph, “Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” published in 1868, when the first transcontinental railroad was nearing completion. “The relationship between the railroad and the landscape is unambiguous,” Nye writes. “The railroad is rapidly developing the American West. The track ahead is still being laid, but the area already served by the railroad contains a prosperous new community and a prominent public school. The power to move across the land is translated into expansion and settlement. Human creations transform the landscape, which in the distance remains vague and unformed, whereas in the foreground a new town has been impelled into life by the railroad…. The Currier and Ives image was both a vision of the recent past and a prediction of the future. It used space to represent time: the new community in the foreground was the present; the empty land ahead of the train was the future, which extended to the vanishing point of perspective. The land ahead was presented as empty space awaiting the coming of white civilization. A few Native Americans on horseback were literally on the margins, watching, with the smoke from the train blowing over them and obscuring their view of the land, and thus of the future.” Nye, America as Second Creation, 158–59.
“The continent lay before them”: Henry Adams, History of the United States, 1300.
“By his invention every river is laid open to us”: Daniel R. Headrick, Tools of Empire, 17.
“gunboat diplomacy”: The Chinese, forced to trade Indian opium for tea, were further humbled when Western gunboats in 1842 defeated a fleet of paddle-wheel warships based on those with which the Sung dynasty had prevailed six hundred years earlier—against pirates in 1132 and Digunai forces in 1161. The fact that Western paddle-wheel steamboats were based on the old Chinese design “was to haunt China in later centuries when her innovative spirit had flagged and her technology was surpassed by that of the Western barbarians,” writes Daniel Headrick, who adds that “in the case of gunboats, we cannot claim that technological innovation caused imperialism, nor that imperialist motives led to technological innovation. Rather, the means and the motives stimulated one another in a relationship of positive mutual feedback.” Headrick, Tools of Empire, 53–4.
“the most signal triumph”: Twenty British and twenty Egyptian troops died on one side, eleven thousand Dervishes on the other. As Churchill added, in what became a colonialist trope, “The strongest and best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modern European Power had been destroyed and dispersed, with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small risk, and insignificant loss to the victors.” Churchill, “The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan,” in Headrick, Tools of Empire, 118–9.
exporting the very gifts…that their conduct defied: The absurdity of the colonialist position encouraged absurdities on opposing sides, as when Mohandas Gandhi asserted, at the outset of World War II, that Great Britain and the United States “lack the moral basis for engaging in this war unless they put their own houses in order…They have no right to talk about protecting democracies and protecting civilization and human freedom, until the canker of white superiority is destroyed.” Abernethy, Dynamics of Global Dominance, 145. Gandhi makes a stirring point but it is hardly the case that nations have “no right to talk” about reform until they themselves have fully reformed. The English prohibition against slavery at home was a good start even though England still permitted slavery overseas, for a time, and it would hardly have been a good idea for the Allied powers to have spent years “putting their houses in order” before confronting the Nazis.
“the very idea of distant possessions will be even ridiculed”: Priestley, Letters to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 1791, in Kramnick, The Portable Enlightenment Reader, 670. In 1768, Priestley put the case more broadly: “Knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and knowledge, as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will, in fact, be increased; nature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others. Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.” Priestley’s effusions about “happiness” increasing to a “paradisiacal” state may have been fulsome but his predictions otherwise proved to be admirably accurate.
“a history that placed its own progress at the heart of the story”: John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 11.