THE DISCOVERY OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

It is not easy to classify Pattison in terms of modern academic disciplines. He might be defined as a classicist, an historian, a philosopher, or a theologian, but none of these definitions quite captures the nature of his intellectual endeavours. His central preoccupation was what we now call intellectual history. This was largely a nineteenth-century invention: ‘to most persons’, wrote Jowett, ‘the very notion that ideas have a history is a new one’. It was new, but it rapidly became pervasive. ‘In the last century’, wrote Morley in 1874, ‘men asked of a belief or a story, Is it true? We now ask, How did men come to take it for true?’ Enlightenment historians had included ideas and culture within their category of the history of ‘manners’, but this also embraced what we would call social and economic history, and the history of ideas did not exist as a separate pursuit. Donald Kelley has sought to persuade us that the history of ideas emerged in France from the work of Victor Cousin and the Eclectics, but its genealogy can equally plausibly be traced to the German idealists and historicists. In any case it would be a mistake to tie it to one particular intellectual tradition. The conviction that ideas ultimately drove history was a widespread belief – sometimes almost a commonplace – in the nineteenth century, and by no means only within the idealist tradition: Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, for example, both articulated this belief.