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By Root 5548 0

discovery of the law of gravitation paved the way for a new mental image of the universe, whereby it could be seen as essentially an immense physical mechanism which was open to understanding by the human mind because its workings were governed by wholly consistent physical laws. Newton himself was deeply religious and for him this vision of a perfectlyordered universe was merely confirmation that it must be the creation of a supernatural mind. The more his own intelligence came to understand how physical creation fitted together, the more he was awed by its unity (`nature', as he put it `is very consonant and conformable with itself'). Yet, equally, the more he discovered, the more he sensed just how little of the workings of the physical universe the human mind could ever hope to understand. As he also put it in a famous passage: `I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'

By the mid-eighteenth century, however, we see a world in which even this sense of awe before an immense mystery has begun to vanish. Above the line' we see a civilisation bathed in the confident light of a consciousness which is based above all on the ordering function of the human mind. Its architecture is harmonious and orderly, its painting and literature likewise. When it observes nature it does so by means of classification and taxonomy. Its thinkers imagine there is no problem confronting mankind, from the making of political constitutions to increasing the productivity of agriculture, which cannot be resolved by use of the human intellect to perceive the laws and principles which lie behind it. So bright now is the `light of reason' that the remnants of that old mediaeval sense of a transcendent, supernatural dimension to human existence are beginning to fade away into little more than high-minded sentimentality. The spirit ruling this world has come to be seen as no more than a 'benevolent Deity'. Yet when we look at this `age of enlightenment' in terms of its storytelling, we see how much of what constitutes psychic totality had now dropped out of view.

It was revealing that such a characteristic plot of stories in the eighteenth century was the `Voyage and Return, describing the adventures of travellers such as Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, Candide, Rasselas and the Ancient Mariner venturing into unknown realms.This was not just because the eighteenth century, with its voyages into the uncharted southern hemisphere, was one of the great ages of European exploration in the outward, physical world. The essence of this type of story is that it shows someone living in a state of limited consciousness suddenly falling through the floor into some hidden realm which contains a whole dimension of existence of which they were previously unaware. The appearance of this plot (as in the novels of Kafka, Evelyn Waugh or J. D. Salinger) is always a sign that consciousness has become dangerously one-sided and split off from the unconscious. And nothing is more striking about eighteenth-century storytelling than the extent to which it manages to diminish or shut out the dark side of human nature. The Overcoming the Monster plot in its more grotesque expressions virtually drops out of western storytelling (except occasionally in pastiche form, as in the sea-monster which appears in Mozart's opera Idomeneo). The eighteenth century was much more naturally at home with the cosy, optimistic world of comedy. So ill at ease was it with the darker spirit of Tragedy that attempts were even made to rewrite the tragedies of Shakespeare to give them happy endings, such as the famous reworking of King Lear by Nahum Tate, defended by Dr Johnson, which showed Lear and Cordelia surviving to take a final curtain.

Beneath the harmoniously ordered surface of this civilisation, however, behind the elegant crescents of Bath, the calmly rational prose of the French Encyclopaedists, the dancers circling