Posterity Avenged Him

In the eighteenth century, human knowledge was not as compartmentalized as it is today. Indeed, the boundaries between intellectual disciplines that we now view as distinct remained tenaciously blurry until remarkably recently. To give just one example, your admittedly venerable reviewer once attended a university that still awarded its physics and chemistry graduates degrees in natural philosophy, while those who actually studied philosophy received theirs in the moral sciences. This difference goes a long way toward explaining why, from the perspective of our own age of specialization, it is so hard for us to appreciate just how different our planet must have appeared to the people who were observing it during the era in which the fledgling United States declared its independence and the French staged their revolution.Back then the age of discovery was at its peak, and startling new information about what had previously been a very parochial planet was flooding into the academies of Europe and the Americas. Inevitably, much of that knowledge was still undigested and poorly sorted; as a result the planet, viewed from Europe, must have seemed a rather impressionistic and formless p...