The history of ideas revisited

Abstract

In an essay entitled « Objectives and Methods in-intellectual History », published in 1957, I proposed that the field of study known as the history of ideas (often called intellectual history in the United States) be defined as a search for (a) the most general presuppositions of thought in a given age and (b) the factors responsible for bringing about changes in those presuppositions in the course of time'.By way of illustrating this approach to the history of ideas I undertook to delineate (1) what I conceived to be the dominant view of nature in the eighteenth century, (2) a formerly dominant but now (in the eighteenth century) subdominant view centered on the notion of decline from original perfection, and (3) an incipient view of nature as a law-bound system of matter in motion.I then tried to suggest some of the historical developments responsible for making the once-incipient view of nature the dominant view by the end of the nineteenth century.By that time the static view of nature as a framework of rationally contrived structures fitted as a stage for the activities of intelligent beings had been replaced by a view that represented all the structures of nature -stars, solar systems, mountain ranges, species, etc. -as products of the operations of a law-bound system of matter in motion ; the only permanent structures were the atoms, the ultimate particles of the system of matter in motion.As to the factors which helped to produce this change in presuppositions concerning nature, I suggested the following : (1) new discoveries in astronomy, geology, and paleontology suggesting that the seemingly permanent structures of nature might be more mutable than had been 1.

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