A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

y which men agree to live together under a strong ruler. Man created society and government out
of his craving for order: therefore, no king rules by divine right, but by a general agreement. In
Holland, the philosopher Spinoza was expelled from his Jewish congregation for insisting that
religion should be based on reason, and that all the truths of religion can be grasped through reason.
John Locke, born in the same year as Spinoza (1632), taught that man is by nature good, and that
again, the only principle he can finally trust is that of reason.
These men were the true heirs of Plato and the Italian humanists, and clearly, they were more
dangerous to authority than Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin all rolled into one. What made
them more dangerous was that they had no intention of challenging organised religion. They were
too fascinated by the immense new vistas that were being opened up by the use of reason and
imagination. Descartes invented analytical geometry, Newton and Leibniz the differential calculus -
mathematical instruments of immense power in uncovering the secrets of nature. Yet all three
would have regarded themselves as orthodox Christians - Newton even spent years of his life
working out a ‘history of the earth’ based on the chronology of the Bible. In A Short History of the
World, H. G. Wells expresses the situation in one of his brilliant images: ‘The history of mankind
for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily
while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking, but incorporating the
crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams...’ (Chapter 52). Yet in a
sense, it hardly matters that Descartes, Newton and Leibniz are sleepers. What matters is that
Leibniz dreamed of a society of scholars who would investigate all branches of science and
combine them into one great system of truth, and that Newton’s Principia provided all future
scientists with a key to the mechanics of the universe. Anyone who has grasped the meaning of
human history will realise that mankind is still far from awake.
While the scientists and philosophers dreamed of truth, the rest of the world pursued its favourite
occupation of mass murder. Yet even this was gradually changing. One of the last of the old-style
world-conquerors, Babur, was a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane. In the year Columbus
returned from his first American voyage, Babur came to his father’s throne in Ferghana (in Genghis
Khan country) and, by the time he was twenty, had twice taken and twice lost Samarkand. Driven
out of Transoxania by the Tartars, he made himself master of Afghanistan, then decided that he
wanted to be emperor of India. His first invasion in 1519 ended in failure, but five years later he
was back again at the head of a force of twelve thousand and made himself master of Delhi. When
his favourite son, Humayun fell ill, Babur prayed that his own life should be taken instead;
Humayun recovered and Babur fell ill and died (1530). Humayun lost his empire for a while to an
Afghan adventurer, but returned after fifteen years of exile and recaptured Delhi. He died shortly
afterwards in an accident, and was succeeded by his son, Akbar the Great Mogul. Akbar went on to
build a vast empire in northern India and Afghanistan. But he was no mere Tamurlane – in fact, he
was altogether closer to Kubla Khan. With an empire full of Moslems and Hindus - even Christians
- he insisted on treating them all alike and allowing all equal opportunities. His court was famous
for its learning as well as for its magnificence. So while Europe was torn with religious wars, and
the duke of Alva was burning Dutchmen by the thousand, Akbar the Great Mogul was revealing a
kind of greatness that had been rare since the days of Asoka. Significantly, a representative of the
East India Company arrived in Akbar’s domains in 1603, and was granted a concession five years
later. Akbar died in 1605, and religious tolerance continued in northern India for more than sixty
years, when the emperor Aurengzeb began a mass persecution of Hindus.