The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

With this trifling exception, it was a noble religion, sternly monotheistic, rejecting images and priests and the polytheism of saints, building strong characters with the doctrine of fatalism and the discipline of war, raising great universities and cultures at Cordova, Granada, Cairo, Bagdad, and Delhi, giving the world one of its greatest rulers—Akbar of India—and ennobling Spain, Egypt, Constantinople, Palestine, and India with gracious architecture from the Alhambra to the Taj Mahal. Today, despite their political dismemberment, they are still growing in numbers and strength; in India and China they are making converts every hour of every day. There is no surety that the future is not theirs.

8. 1294—THE DEATH OF ROGER BACON This date is almost as good as any other to mark the first use of gunpowder, for the rebellious English monk who died in this year may be held partly responsible for its invention. It was Roger Bacon who first definitely described the explosive that would revolutionize the world and offer to all pious statesmen a substitute for birth control. “One may cause to burst forth from bronze,” he wrote, “thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter occasions a terrible explosion accompanied by brilliant light. One may multiply the phenomena so far as to destroy an army or a city.”

Very likely. It was gunpowder that gave to the rising bourgeoisie of late medieval Europe the means of overthrowing the feudal baron by bombarding from a distance his once impregnable castle. It was gunpowder that made the infantry as important as the cavalry, and gave the common man a new prestige in war and a new power in revolutions. It was gunpowder that turned war from a gentleman’s game, occasionally fatal, to a form of standardized mass destruction, a mode of removing from the earth, with a few minutes’ bombardment, the work of a hundred thousand artists’ hands laboring for three centuries. Perhaps this is the most important date in the story of the fall of man; though some cynic might argue that a still more tragic event was the invention of thinking, the liberation of intellect from instinct, the consequent separation of sex from reproduction, and the abandonment of the perpetuation of the race to the selected morons of every land.

9. 1454—THE PRESS OF JOHANNES GUTENBERG (AT MAINZ ON THE RHINE) ISSUES THE FIRST PRINTED DOCUMENTS BEARING A PRINTED DATE The Germans had used printing from movable types for some fourteen years before; the Chinese had done such printing as far back as A.D. 1041; and in 1900 a block-printed book was discovered in China which had been published in 868. Nothing is new in China, democracy least of all. They invented gunpowder and used it chiefly for fireworks. They invented printing and never used it for tabloid newspapers, crime club fiction, or Freudian biographies.

In Western civilization, printing helped money and muskets to liberate the middle class and put an end to the rule of the knights and the priests. It enabled the people to read the Bible, and so engendered the Reformation. It immensely widened the circle to which a writer might address his ideas. And by transferring the making of books from monks to printers’ devils, and the patronage of books from the aristocracy and the church to the commonalty and the laity, it made possible the propaganda and development of democracy and free thought.

Napoleon remarked that the Bourbons might have preserved themselves, and prevented the French Revolution, by maintaining a governmental monopoly of ink. Our empowered middle class has profited by the example and has made literacy an impediment to the acquisition of truth. One hardly knows, today, whether printing does more harm than good, or whether the growth of knowledge and learning has not weakened character as much as it has stocked the mind—but let us try it a little further!

10. 1492—COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA When Columbus discovered us, he put an end to the Italian Renaissance by changing trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and bringing wealth and power first to Spain, making possible Velázquez and Cervantes, Murillo and Calderon; then to England, financing Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and Hobbes; then to the Netherlands, producing Rembrandt and Spinoza, Rubens and Van Dyck, Hobbema and Vermeer; and then to France, generating Rabelais and Montaigne, Poussin and Claude Lorraine. When, in 1564, Michelangelo died and Shakespeare was born, it was a sign that the Renaissance had died in Italy and been reborn in England. The discovery of America cooperated with the Reformation, and the diminution of Peter’s Pence, in ending for a time the role of Italy in history.