The Ascent of Man

Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it was transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man.

A large system of irrigation extending over an empire requires a strong central authority.

The universe of Newton ticked on without a hitch for about two hundred years. If his ghost had come to Switzerland any time before 1900, all the clocks would have chimed hallelujah in unison. And yet, just after 1900 in Berne, not two hundred yards from the ancient clocktower, a young man came to live who was going to set them all by the ears: Albe

Art and science are both uniquely human actions, outside the range of anything that an animal can do. And here we see that they derive from the same human faculty: the ability to visualise the future, to foresee what may happen and plan to anticipate it, and to represent it to ourselves in images that we project and move about inside our head, or i

the life of each, man and the plant, depends on the other.

But war, organised war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and co-operative form of theft.

There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognise ourselves in the past on the steps to the present. All over these caves the print of the hand say

Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.

These men still worked to the end of the empire with the beam; they never invented the arch. Here is a measure of the time lag between the New World and the Old, because this is exactly the point which the Greeks reached two thousand years earlier, and at which they also stopped.