THE INVENTION OF INVENTION^59
to what replaced them, but no one was listening to pagan nature wor
shippers in Christian Europe.
- The Judeo-Christian sense of linear time. Other societies thought
of time as cyclical, returning to earlier stages and starting over again.
Linear time is progressive or regressive, moving on to better things or
declining from some earlier, happier state. For Europeans in our pe
riod, the progressive view prevailed.
- In the last analysis, however, I would stress the market. Enterprise
was free in Europe. Innovation worked and paid, and rulers and vested
interests were limited in their ability to prevent or discourage innova
tion. Success bred imitation and emulation; also a sense of power that
would in the long run raise men almost to the level of gods. The old
legends remained—the expulsion from the Garden, Icarus who flew
too high, Prometheus in chains—to warn against hubris. (The very no
tion of hubris—cosmic insolence—is testimony to some men's preten
sions and the efforts of others to curb them.)
But the doers were not paying attention.
