It is a commonplace of the history of natural science and philosophy to think of change over time as a gradual clearing of the mist in all minds, as if each individual were gradually able to see better. However, the literature tells a different story; in every age we see traces of minds that were, with little evidence, clearly on the right track and in many cases had leapt with good reasoning to sound though very abstract conclusions. Epicurus is a good example, but every age is rich in such examples. 

If there is anything to the concept of the intellectual mist lifting, it is that more accurate concepts increase in frequency and may even come to dominate a population. In other words, that there is an average effect over the whole population of human minds. But this insight should remind us that this is not a monotonic phenomenon, with a burst of light – Let Newton Be... – after which irreversible progress has been made. Shifts in the population of mental representations are prone to ebb and flow, for a complex of reasons not all of which drive internal coherence and correspondence.

There is, of course, much evidence for the accumulation of vastly increased informational and evidential material over time. It is true that this too is prone to setbacks – Alexandrian libraries are sometimes burned – but the trend over the last two millenia has been towards increased volumes of evidence, and provided that the energy supply to human societies does not falter, and a sufficient part of that supply is devoted to informational maintenance, it is likely to continue.

But this simple increase in informational mass or volume is not a good description for change in intellectual history, where transitions are of a somewhat, though not entirely different character. Change is accounted for by fluctuations in predominance or frequency rather than appearances and disappearances; clear, correspondent statements may increase in predominance or frequency, rather than crystallizing out of fresh air. Of course concepts do, let there be no doubt about this, become more complex, detailed, fine-grained, qualified, and descriptively and predictively accurate, but the head terms that are the abstract summaries of a whole population of modern statements, change little, because they are sufficiently abstract to retain their purchase on life and matter. This accounts for the otherwise puzzling truth that while there is nothing new under the sun in science and philosophy it cannot be denied that real progress is made. Heraclitus prefigures thermodynamics, however eliptically; thermodynamics is not new, but it is genuine progress. All the sciences, without exception, provide similar examples. Intellectual progress is not a matter of sudden enlightenment, by transcendent revelation, but the refinement of propositions under existing headings, and an increase in the frequency of their representation in the population of minds.

All our facts, the facts of which we are aware, are abstract, and the more profound their claims the more super-abstract they become. And when some say, in their vaunting carelessness, that there is no limit to what can be known, or, which is more frequent, when they avoid saying such a foolish thing but quietly behave as if it were so, they mean or tacitly believe that all the facts of the universe before the present may be comprehended beneath some hyper-abstract description. No doubt this is possible, but descriptions of this kind are so lacking in detail that they would have little interest, particularly because they would be so vague that their future orientation, their predictions, would be so general that they would not differ at all from an abstract account of the past, and would hardly seem to count as predictions at all since it is inconceivable that they could be wrong. That is not surprising, since they must transcend time; but without a temporal dimension they lose relevance to time-bound organisms.

Ubbelohde notes with emphasis and reason that periods of international conflict often coincide with significant progress in science and engineering. This should not surprise us. Progress in these fields is very costly, and implies a significant, short-run opportunity cost to the securing of reproduction for the wider population. It will therefore find a limit, an equilibrium well below the theoretical maximum for progress. Put another way, in peacetime science and engineering will not progress as fast as it could, because the population prefers to consume the wealth rather than assigning that resource to science. In times of war, the presence of deadly external threat alters that balance and means that it becomes reasonable and probably worthwhile to assign more resources to science and technology, in other words to reduce security of reproduction a little in the short run in order to increase it in the longer run.

Collectivists assert collective interest over individual interest, whereas individualists begin with the recognition of individual interest and accept collective interest as the result of intersecting individual interests.

Individualism is thus not only correspondent with the world as observed, which clearly contains only self-interested individuals with interests that overlap to produce collective interest, but also causally inclusive, since it provides a causal account of collectivism. Individualism can explain collectivism, but Collectivism cannot explain individualism except as aberrant evil.

That is to say, Collectivism is Virtue in Mandeville's sense, a requirement (never fulfilled) for a frustration of human interest, for self-denial. Such positions must, as Mandeville recognised, class all self-assertion as vicious if they are to be robust; no degree of compromise is tenable, all must slide to the extremes. One is either a rigorist, or one denies that the relevant Virtue has any standing.

On the liberal side of the argument there is too much careless talk of 'the state' without any precise indication of its substantial presence or presences. No one should ever forget that the state is unreal, only realised in the monarch, and, latterly, in the persons of its employees. Our current position in the United Kingdom is the outcome of a collapse of monarchical instantiation in the 1640s. Similar progressions have occurred around the world. So long as the monarch is a person, a King or a Queen, and unfettered, absolute, a state with many terrible disadvantages of course, the servants of the state cannot embody it, they are merely tools, and no more an embodiment of the state than the throne on which the monarch sits, or the palaces in which they live. With the monarch removed, or rendered constitutional (which is the same thing), the state servants become the embodiment of state power, often enough arbitrary power, and the struggle between the people and the wilful monarch must shift to new ground.

But, judging from our own case, this adjustment is slow. The citizenry does not notice at first that it is in conflict with the state in another form, since electoral politics gives the appearance of individual influence over administration. But this appearance, though not quite an illusion, has very little substance, and what substance it has does not show a rising trend. If anything, it declines. The civil service grows steadily in mass and power, almost unnoticed by the rest of the people. There is no conspiracy here, merely the steady development of an emergent property. Moreover, the civil service recruits from the surrounding population as well as from its own families, a fact that also weakens opposition, since it tends to recruit those who would be the most troublesome, those who are unlikely to thrive as private persons but are intellectually able.

The political process steadily becomes a charade, with a change of politicians producing no change of government. Unfocused discontent grows, both at the stagnation and the powerless state of the people, and also at the loss of freedom. As yet in this country it tends to rest on archaic and redundant concepts, and so mistakenly blames politicians for the perceived ills. But politicians could not succeed in addressing the problems, even assuming that they were able to identify them, since they are powerless even and especially when they are in office. The civil service has little difficulty in dealing with ministers who try to weaken its authority, and the eye of the public is on the politician and holds them to standards unattainable by any living person. The civil service, on the other hand, is all but unscrutinised.

Although the public is barely aware of it, the state is now embodied by that subsection of the population that is nominally the servant of the commonwealth. But they are also voting citizens, a fact that no one today would question, but on reflection this is an extraordinary and probably deeply undesirable fact, for the electoral power of a large civil service is not to be dismissed; collectively, their bulk is probably the single largest common-interest group. But they do not, qua interest group, rely on their electoral resources alone, and during those periods, inevitable in a democracy, when a relatively individualist, anti-statist party is in power, retired civil servants, if there can be such a thing, assist their preferred party in opposition as they prepare for government.

Individuals substantially independent of the state, either because they are self-employed or because they are employed by companies that not reliant state patronage – admittedly a shrinking fraction of the economy – will gravitate towards the most individualist party the can find, with surprising results, such as blue collar support for individualist parties. Though wage earning, they are independent people in the sense of not being the recipients of direct or indirect state patronage. While the free intellectuals, and the middle classes are important, it is not from these people that any resistance to the state will emerge, but from the much more courageous, unpretentious but intelligent and proudly independent people found in the lower income bands. The state party and the civil service is conscious of the risk, and defuses discontent by means of state support (benefits), and by exploiting rational fear of wealth differentials.

There is no reason why this complex balance of powers should not continue indefinitely, except that the civil service are both arrogant and fallible, and external shocks may disrupt the system, exposing the aggregate weakness of a collectivised and state dominated people as compared to a population of freely self-serving individuals. Only disaster and suffering can provide sufficient positive proof of state incompetence to reverse the long term trend, and even that reversal is inevitably susceptible to counter pressure. So long as there is a state and a people, the dynamic oscillation seems likely to continue.

Even now, thirty years or so after the event, I can recall clearly my indignation at first reading T. S. Eliot’s observation that poetry could not "save us", that it was only a “civilised amusement”. It now seems to me that no higher claim can be sustained, and, indeed, that very little cultural output of any kind deserves such exalted praise.

Several of the world's societies have become rich over the last several centuries for reasons that the did not understand, and they may become poor again for the continuing failure to understand these reasons. But the transition may be different in character, and could give rise to knowledge. With wealth, as with elevation, one climbs slowly but falls fast.

Academics make reference only to other academics or to dead classics. It would be pleasant to think that this was an index of quality, and to a degree it is so; but not to a degree sufficient to explain the whole phenomenon. Some part, perhaps even the majority of this effect, is explained by a mixture of statistics and professional interest. The first of these is easily explained: Even if the academic were citing at random within the field, most of their references would be to other academics, since that is where the bulk of the accessible literature is produced. It is a matter of simple probabilities. The remainder of the effect, the exclusion of the non-academic writers other than the deceased, is is explained by the fact that such people are negligible as professional threats; as a career-constructing scholar, you have no reason to think that such people will ever be in a position either to assist or to harm you.

The concept of intellectual transcendence is attractive, but unclear. What would such transcendence be like? We can’t say, and on reflection it becomes obvious that we cannot form a clear idea of intellectual transcendence without having actually achieved that state? Unfortunately, this makes someone who has not achieved intellectual transcendence vulnerable to exploitation by anyone falsely claiming that they have done so. Unfortunately, even if there is someone who has actually achieved this wonderful state they won’t be able to help the exploited party since a person who has not achieved intellectual transcendence won’t be able to distinguish the genuine article from the fake.

It would appear, therefore, to be better and certainly safer to reject this concept. In any case, the idea appears to be generated from very humble roots. The subject experiences their own existence as both subjective consciousness and bodily sensation. However, we only experience other people as bodies mediated via our own bodily sensations. To put it crudely, we only infer that other people are conscious too, and in fact we frequently only attribute consciousness to others in a very depleted sense. I realise that no one will wish to admit to this, but candid reflection will I think confirm the fact that we hardly ever attribute to others the complex consciousness of our own state. One suspects that the concept of intellectual transcendence is derived from this self-centered perspective, and so has little more content than the solipsism from which it is derived. In other words, one discounts the bodily fact in general on the ground that we see bodies outside ourselves, but we don’t experience any one else’s consciousness. Thus, it is inferred that bodies like our own are not necessarily conscious at all, and certainly not in the way that we are, and that therefore the intellect must be transcendent. I am describing here the genesis of an intuition, not a convincing chain of reasoning leading to a conclusion.

In the 1920s, and particularly the 1930s and after, the turn to close reading is evident everywhere in in academic literary criticism, and inevitably in what remained of general criticism outside the universities, both professional and informal. Those practising this new form, or rather this concentrated and public incarnation of what had always happened in any private reading though rarely made explicit, tended to describe themselves as introducing a new precision and higher standards of proof and demonstration into criticism, superseding the impressionists of the previous century, and particularly the early part of the twentieth century.

Much of this tendency is to be explained by the undoubted fact that the academic profession needed to hold its head up in the university, and mere literary history, mere textual scholarship, did not offer sufficient propositional prestige or sufficiently broad niches for the expanding discipline. I. A. Richards’ psychological work might have offered a viable route, though it too would have been narrow, and ancillary to a more general philosophy and science of mind, and could not deliver the pre-eminence, or at least plausible pretensions to pre-eminence, that those establishing the field required, as witness F. R. Leavis. Indeed, Leavis’s quarrel with Richards demonstrates precisely this point.

In any case, Richards had to extraordinary degree contributed to the cult of close readings through his own psychological speculations, in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and in Practical Criticism (1929). To a degree, this was inadvertent; he genuinely was attempting psychology – the short passages collected from his students were called protocols and he meant it in the German scientific sense, “observations” – and the focus necessary for that work also encouraged close reading as a method normal engagement with texts as well as a means of gathering useful evidence. But it was also deliberate in that Richards was not entirely detached in experimentation. It is everywhere evident in these early books, that he was, as he wrote in a letter to his wife during the composition of Principles that he was trying to put the arts back into the centre of all values. Empson was not accident; he was positivel encouraged.

Allowing all this to be true, as I believe it is, it should be granted that there may be a further causal factor in the turn to microscopic analysis, a turn not explainec by progress, improvement and the supercession of the indolent and complacent forebears. Indeed, that explanation is first of all suspicious because transparently self-serving, and secondly because it is not consistent with the actual practise of Arnold, Bagehot, Stephen, Bradley, or much of the second rank of criticism in the periodicals. They are not lazy or imprecise; they are elliptical; they take so much for granted in their readers, and they did so because they knew that it was safe to assume that even the slightest hint would be correctly understood as a demonstration, that it would expand inferentially in the mind of the reader. This confidence, which I use here in a more literal sense than is usual, was itself grounded in a shared and high standard of reading. They read attentively and they read often in unison, and always with sufficient common ground for their divergences to be mutually and intersubjectively intelligible. The small size of the reading population and the similarities of their educational backgrounds clearly helped. These critics understood each other and were sure that they understood what they read precisely because they understood each other’s readings even and especially when they disagreed.

In such an environment detailed demonstration was redundant and to indulge in it would have seemed neurotic, burdensome and insecure. But such an insecure neurosis would soon become all-but universal, with close-reading indispensable in order to secure communication and even self-confidence in the readings described. The trend continues, except amongst close friends; we resort to close readings not only to communicate our interpretation to a wider audience, but in order to reassure ourselves that we have actually understood the text.