Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The Enlightenment and the industrial revolution naturally introduced yet more new words – reservoir, condenser, sodium (1807), Centigrade (1812), biology (1819), kleptomania (1830), palaeontology (1838), gynaecology and bacterium (both 1847), claustrophobia (1879). It has been estimated that between 1750 and 1900 half the world’s scientific papers were published in English.¹³² In India, at the height of the British empire, it was arguable as to which people had the linguistic power. For a start, the deep and distant background of much English, as an Indo-European language, was Sanskrit. But new words taken into English from Indian languages included bungalow, cheroot, thug, chintz, polo, jungle, lilac, pariah, khaki (which means ‘dust-coloured’) and pyjamas.¹³³

The English ridd Kolkata as Calcutta, though it has recently returned to the original.

But as English spread in the nineteenth century, with the British empire, to Australia, the West Indies, to Africa and many areas of the Middle East, it became what Arabic, Latin and French had once been, the common currency of international communication, a position it has held ever since. Gandhi felt enslaved by English, or said that he did, but the excellence and popularity of Indian novelists writing in English belies this sentiment. The triumph of English across the world may reflect earlier notions of nationalism and imperialism but it has gone well beyond them. English is the language not only of empire, but of science, capitalism, democracy – and the Internet.

34

The American Mind and the Modern University

The high point of empire in the Old World coincided more or less with the American Civil War. In a way, therefore, each continent faced a similar predicament – how different peoples, different races, should live together. The Civil War was a watershed in all ways for America. Although not many people realised it at the time, her dilemma over slavery had kept the country back and the war at last allowed the full forces of capitalism and industrialism to flex their muscles. Only after the war was the country fully free to fulfil its early promise.

The population in 1865 was upwards of 31 million, and therefore, relatively speaking, still small compared with the major European states. Intellectual life was – like everything else – still in the process of formation and expansion.¹

After the triumphs of 1776, and the glories of the Constitution, which many Europeans had found so stimulating, Americans did not want for lack of confidence. But there was, even so, much uncertainty: the frontier was continuing to open up (raising questions about how to deal with the Plains Indians), and the pattern of immigration was changing. Louisiana was purchased from the French in 1803. On all sides, therefore, questions of race, tribe, nationality, religious affiliation and ethnic identity were ever-present. In this context, America had to fashion itself, devising new ideas where they were needed, and using ideas from the Old World where they were available and relevant.²

The gradual assimilation of European ideas into an American context has been chronicled both by Richard Hofstadter and, more recently and more fully, by Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard, by means of biographical accounts of a small number of nineteenth-century individuals, all New Englanders, who knew each other and who between them invented what we may call the characteristically American tradition of modern thought, the American mind. The first part of this chapter relies heavily on Menand’s work.³ The specialities of these few individuals included philosophy, jurisprudence, psychology, biology, geology, mathematics, economics and religion. In particular we are talking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Benjamin and Charles Peirce, Louis Agassiz and John Dewey.