So questions which we now pose about past time and place are perverse. Victorians were obsessed with grand schemes and unitary concepts. In the wake of the collapse of Christian totalitarianism, which followed the Renaissance, the Reformat-ion and the Enlightenment, they wanted an alternative grand explanation of everything, so we got Gibbon, Carlyle, Frazer, Darwin, Freud and thousands of others. Instead of Time being a working out of God s Will from the Fall to the New Jerusalem, they saw it as a working-out of Progress from the primitive to the masterful and successful. Marx followed the Romantic view of history, whereas Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche and their successors followed the Progressive view.
Reality is simply a matter of convention Our concept of reality is artificial and culture-bound.
We imagine the real world to be a projection of our egos which in turn are formed by the public world which controls economies and families alike. Reality is simply a matter of convention, like good manners and wearing particular kinds of clothes. We assume that there is a definite and definitive real world out there which we only have to examine. This is the scientific fallacy born out of the Renaissance. Only recently have we begun to realise that this might not be so, that time is circular, and that knowledge is only the currently-acceptable fiction in our heads.