Adding Knowledge Produces More Knowledge
Perhaps humanity’s most fundamental invention was the realization that collaboration improves our chances of survival in almost any circumstance. Working together alone, however, would hardly qualify as a remarkable invention. What is far more distinctive is our capacity to cooperate in the transmission of knowledge and the encouragement of learning.
We are often surprised both by the speed with which an individual can learn and by the ability of students eventually to surpass their teachers. Yet the principle behind this process is ancient: the accumulation of knowledge produces more knowledge.
The civilizations traditionally counted among the oldest—the Chinese civilization of East Asia, Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, and ancient Egypt along the Nile—already possessed social organizations that encouraged learning in fields such as basic arithmetic, astronomy, and medicine. Influential groups, frequently associated with public administration, acquired their knowledge through relatively rigid systems based on repetition: calculating the distribution of land or grain, for example.
The cultural expansion of the Mediterranean world, first through Greek civilization and later through Hellenistic and Roman culture, gradually transformed this rigid approach to learning. The spread of alphabets, the circulation of manuscripts, their accumulation in repositories and early libraries, and the formation of schools all contributed to a new intellectual landscape.
From the Greek Schools to Alexandria
Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum were no longer merely places for training officials of the state or the polis. They helped establish the idea that the exchange of knowledge could facilitate the production of new knowledge.
The most prestigious school of antiquity was Alexandria. Its library became a reference point for learning throughout centuries of the Hellenistic world, so much so that the expression “the lighthouse of Alexandria” can still evoke the idea of a beacon illuminating knowledge.
Many of the most important names in ancient science were associated in one way or another with this intellectual tradition: Euclid, Eratosthenes, Archimedes, Heron, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Galen, and Hypatia, among others.
The dissolution of the Greco-Roman world brought about the decline of many of the great Greek schools. But the idea of assembling books and scholars in a major institution devoted to knowledge did not disappear.
It reemerged with particular force in Abbasid Baghdad. The intellectual world associated with the House of Wisdom cultivated mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and the study of nature. Ancient works were translated and studied, while scholars also developed ideas of their own. Algebra, in particular, was refined into a distinct branch of mathematics.
In this sense, the centers of scholarship in the medieval Islamic world formed an important bridge between the scientific heritage of antiquity and the developing intellectual world of Western Europe.
The University: A New Way to Preserve Knowledge
Several centuries later, Western Europe created a new organization for transmitting knowledge: the university.
The university emerged during the flourishing of medieval Western Europe and became an institution capable of ensuring the transmission of knowledge for centuries because it was able to transform itself alongside the different stages of European intellectual development.
The first universities were not the result of a single enlightened decision by a king, pope, or centralized authority. They evolved from urban schools and institutions associated with existing cathedrals.
Most importantly, a university was not originally defined by a collection of buildings, libraries, or valuable objects. It was fundamentally a community of people—a guild of teachers and students pursuing the common purpose of education.
This was perhaps its greatest institutional innovation: an association created to pursue something as intangible as the transmission of knowledge and the study of subjects not immediately necessary for subsistence. Medicine, law, and theology became major branches of university education.
It is difficult to assign exact foundation dates because many early universities developed gradually. Nevertheless, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Salamanca were among the great early centers. By the thirteenth century, universities were spreading rapidly across Europe, creating a network that stretched from Poland to Portugal and from Scotland to southern Italy.
Two characteristics were especially important. The first was relative independence from local political powers: universities often sought the patronage of more distant authorities, such as the pope or emperor. The second was a degree of uniformity in curricula, which allowed teachers and students to move from one university to another.
Mobility and autonomy became pillars of the medieval university.
The Trivium and Quadrivium
The seven liberal arts strongly influenced medieval university curricula. Their organization can be traced in part to the Roman scholar Varro, who described nine disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music theory, medicine, and architecture.
The final two later disappeared from this particular educational classification, leaving seven subjects divided into two groups.
The trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic. The quadrivium comprised arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
For centuries, this framework helped provide European scholars with a common intellectual language. But the stability that made universities so effective at preserving knowledge could also make them resistant to change.
When Science Moved Outside the University
Despite the upheavals of the sixteenth century, universities had constructed an institutional network capable of accumulating knowledge and transmitting it to successive generations.
The Renaissance, however, changed the intellectual environment. Some inherited ideas were abandoned while others from Greco-Roman antiquity were recovered and admired. Atomistic ideas gained renewed attention; Archimedes was rediscovered in mathematics; and medicine increasingly felt the influence of figures such as Paracelsus and Vesalius.
Universities did not always adapt well to these innovations. They continued to transmit established knowledge effectively, but they were often less successful at incorporating the new experimental sciences.
European society therefore invented another type of institution: the academy or scientific society.
Unlike universities, these institutions were not principally created to educate students. Their objective was to bring together people interested in experimental science and stimulate the growth of new knowledge.
Although academies appeared during the sixteenth century, they flourished in the seventeenth century and reached their greatest vitality during the Enlightenment. Universities and scientific societies began to divide the intellectual territory between them, and scientific academies helped replace the old medieval classification of knowledge with new disciplines such as chemistry, mechanics, mathematical sciences, and celestial mechanics.
Among the best-known institutions were the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the Royal Society of London, and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris.
The London and Paris institutions represented rather different models. In London, people interested in experimental science formed an association that largely governed and financed itself. In Paris, scientific organization was much more directly connected to the Crown, with scholars recruited and supported by royal funds.
The Royal Society formally emerged in 1660 from earlier gatherings of people interested in natural philosophy. Its members observed nature, conducted experiments, discussed results, and communicated their findings. In 1665, its first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, launched Philosophical Transactions, which became one of the foundational publications in the history of scientific communication.
Science Moves into the Salons
Paris became a major scientific center during the Enlightenment, but the Academy was not the only place where mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural history, and philosophy were discussed.
Private clubs and salons also became centers of intellectual life, very often under the direction of women. The salon tradition had existed in France since the sixteenth century, but its influence expanded enormously during the eighteenth century.
The salons became relatively free and plural spaces in which literary, scientific, philosophical, artistic, and political subjects could be discussed. Among the women associated with influential salons were Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse, Louise d’Épinay, and Sophie de Condorcet.
They also provide evidence of women’s intellectual interest in science and philosophy at a time when formal institutions largely excluded them. Perhaps the most famous example was Émilie du Châtelet, mathematician and physicist, one of the leading advocates and interpreters of Newtonian thought in France.
The University Reinvents Itself
The growing influence of Enlightenment societies coincided with a certain decline of universities during the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, European states began remodeling them.
The most influential transformation occurred in Berlin.
The University of Berlin was founded in 1810 under the intellectual influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt and others. A new type of university brought the traditional literary and classical disciplines together with the rapidly advancing natural sciences.
Teaching and research were increasingly united.
Experimental laboratories joined traditional libraries, and professors were expected not merely to transmit established knowledge but to participate in producing new knowledge. The ideal associated with the Humboldtian university emphasized the unity of teaching and research, combined with academic freedom and research-based education.
This model strongly influenced later universities, including many in the United States, and helped establish the foundations of the modern research university.
An ancient idea had once again found a new form. Humanity had created institutions to receive knowledge and transmit it, and then continually invented new ways to enlarge it.
Adding knowledge produces more knowledge.