Modern Mind

and rich. The horrors of the past one hundred years have been so widespread, so plentiful, and are so endemic to man’s modern sensibility that it would seem conventional historians have little or no space for other matters. In one recent 700-page history of the first third of the twentieth century, for example, there is no mention of relativity, of Henri Matisse or Gregor Mendel, no Ernest Rutherford, James Joyce, or Marcel Proust. No George Orwell, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Margaret Mead, no Oswald Spengler or Virginia Woolf. No Leo Szilard or Leo Hendrik Baekeland,no James Chadwick or Paul Ehrlich. No Sinclair Lewis and therefore no Babbitt. 2 Other books echo this lack. In these pages I try to rectify the imbalance and to concentrate on the main intellectual ideas that have shaped our century and which, as Berlin acknowledged, have been uniquely rewarding.
    In giving the book this shape, I am not suggesting that the century has been any less catastrophic than the way it is described in more conventional histories; merely that there is so much more to the era than war. Neither do I mean to imply that politics or military affairs are not intellectual or intelligent matters. They are. In attempting to marry philosophy and a theory of human nature with the practice of governance, politics has always seemed to me one of the more difficult intellectual challenges. And military affairs, in which the lives of individuals are weighed as in no other activity, in which men are pitted against each other so directly, does not fall far short of politics in importance or interest. But having read any number of conventional histories, I wanted something different, something more, and was unable to find it.
    It seems obvious to me that, once we get away from the terrible calamities that have afflicted our century, once we lift our eyes from the horrors of the past decades, the dominant intellectual trend, the most interesting, enduring, and profound development, is very clear. Our century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science. The trend has been profound because the contribution of science has involved not just the invention of new products, the extraordinary range of which has transformed all our lives. In addition to changing what we think about, science has changed
how
we think. In 1988, in
De près et de loin,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, asked himself the following question: ‘Do you think there is a place for philosophy in 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