‘Nature’ as we know it, then, has a history. If we want to give a date for its debut, we can say that the nature that we know and love and which we make great efforts to embrace first arrived in 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s seminal collection introduced the Romantic sensibility to English speaking readers, and it is no exaggeration to say, as the literary philosopher Owen Barfield (1898–1997) has, that the holiday industry, which offers trips to mountains, forests, deserts, and other uncivilised places, owes a great deal to the shift in human consciousness exemplified in their work.
We already know from the discovery of the existence of mirror neurones that when we imitate something that we can see, it is as if we are experiencing it. But it goes further than this. Mental representation, in the absence of direct visual or other stimulus – in other words, imagining – brings into play some of the same neurones that are involved in direct perception.
The Greeks quite clearly and consciously recognized both that history is, or can be, a science, and that it has to do with human actions. Greek history is not legend, it is research; it is an attempt to get answers to definite questions about matters of which one recognizes oneself as ignorant.
There is indeed only one principle which announces, with the same uncompromising clarity as the principle that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” the diametrically opposite maxim for political action. It was expressed almost incidentally in a lonely phrase of one of the loneliest men of the last generation, Georges Clemenceau, when he suddenly exclaimed during his fight in the Dreyfus Affair: “L’Affaire d’un seul est l’affaire de tous” (“The concern of one is the concern of all”).
