Modern Mind

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 what their practitioners
thought
was science). Writers from Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and T. S. Eliot to Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, to mention only a few, all acknowledged a debt to Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein or Sigmund Freud, or some combination of them. In music and modern dance, the influence of atomic physics and of anthropology has been admitted (not least by Arnold Schoenberg), while the phrase ‘electronic music’ speaks for itself. In jurisprudence, architecture, religion, education, in economics and the organisation of work, the findings and the methodology of science have proved indispensable.
    The discipline of history is particularly important in this context because while science has had a direct impact on how historians write, and what they write about, history has itself been evolving. One of the great debates in historiography is over how events move forward. One school of thought has itthat ‘great men’ are mostly what matter, that the decisions of people in power can bring about significant shifts in world events and mentalities. Others believe that economic and commercial matters force change by promoting the interests of certain classes within the overall population. 7 In the twentieth century, the actions of Stalin and Hitler in particular would certainly seem to suggest that ‘great’ men are vital to historical events. But the second half of the century was dominated by thermonuclear weapons, and can one say that any single person, great or otherwise, was really responsible for the bomb? No. In fact, I would suggest that we are living at a time of change, a crossover time in more ways than one, when what we have viewed as the causes of social movement in the past – great men or economic factors playing on social classes – are both being superseded as the engine of social development. That new engine is science.
    There is another aspect of science that I find particularly refreshing. It has no real agenda. What I mean is that by its very nature science cannot be forced in any particular direction. The necessarily open nature of science (notwithstanding the secret work carried out in the Cold War and in some commercial laboratories) ensures that there can only ever be a democracy of intellect in this, perhaps the most important of human activities. What is encouraging about science is that it is not only powerful as a way of discovering things, politically