Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century Read Free

today’s world?’ His reply? ‘Of course, but only if it is based on the current state of scientific knowledge and achievement…. Philosophers cannot insulate themselves against science. Not only has it enlarged and transformed our vision of life and the universe enormously: it has also revolutionised the rules by which the intellect operates.’ 3 That revolution in the rules is explored throughout the present book.
    Critics might argue that, insofar as its relation to science is concerned, the twentieth century has been no different from the nineteenth or the eighteenth; that we are simply seeing the maturation of a process that began even earlier with Copernicus and Francis Bacon. That is true up to a point, but the twentieth century has been different from the nineteenth and earlier centuries in three crucial respects. First, a hundred-plus years ago science was much more a disparate set of disciplines, and not yet concerned with fundamentals. John Dalton, for example, had inferred the existence of the atom early in the nineteenth century, but no one had come close to identifying such an entity or had the remotest idea how it might be configured. It is, however, a distinguishing mark of twentieth-century science that not only has the river of discovery (to use John Maddox’s term) become a flood but that many
fundamental
discoveries have been made, in physics, cosmology, chemistry, geology, biology, palaeontology, archaeology, and psychology. 4 And it is one of the moreremarkable coincidences of history that most of these fundamental concepts – the electron, the gene, the quantum, and the unconscious – were identified either in or around 1900.
    The second sense in which the twentieth century has been different from earlier times lies in the fact that various fields of inquiry – all those mentioned above plus mathematics, anthropology, history, genetics and linguistics – are now coming together powerfully, convincingly, to tell one story about the natural world. This story, this one story, as we shall see, includes the evolution of the universe, of the earth itself, its continents and oceans, the origins of life, the peopling of the globe, and the development of different races, with their differing civilisations. Underlying this story, and giving it a framework, is the process of evolution. As late as 1996 Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher, was still describing Darwin’s notion of evolution as ‘the best idea, ever.’ 5 It was only in 1900 that the experiments of Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak, recapitulating and rediscovering the work of the Benedictine monk Gregor Mendel on the breeding rules of peas, explained how Darwin’s idea might work at the individual level and opened up a huge new area of scientific (not to mention philosophical) activity. Thus, in a real sense, I hold in this book that evolution by natural selection is just as much a twentieth – as a nineteenth – century theory.
    The third sense in which the twentieth century is different scientifically from earlier eras lies in the realm of psychology. As Roger Smith has pointed out, the twentieth century was a psychological age, in which the self became privatised and the public realm – the crucial realm of political action on behalf of the public good – was left relatively vacant. 6 Man looked inside himself in ways he hadn’t been able to before. The decline of formal religion and the rise of individualism made the century
feel
differently from earlier ones.
    Earlier on I used the phrase ‘coming to terms with’ science, and by that I meant that besides the advances that science itself made, forcing themselves on people, the various other disciplines, other modes of thought or ways of doing things, adjusted and responded but could not ignore science. Many of the developments in the visual arts – cubism, surrealism, futurism, constructivism, even abstraction itself – involved responses to science (or