origin of the world essay

How well it suits all men, on the subject of chaos, to say that it is a kind of darkness! But in fact it comes from a shadow, which has been called by the name 'darkness'. And the shadow comes from a product that has existed since the beginning. It is, moreover, clear that it existed before chaos came into being, and that the latter is posterior to the first product. Let us therefore concern ourselves with the facts of the matter; and furthermore, with the first product, from which chaos was projected. And in this way the truth will be clearly demonstrated.

After the natural structure of the immortal beings had completely developed out of the infinite, a likeness then emanated from Pistis (Faith); it is called Sophia (Wisdom). It exercised volition and became a product resembling the primeval light. And immediately her will manifested itself as a likeness of heaven, having an unimaginable magnitude; it was between the immortal beings and those things that came into being after them, like [...]: she (Sophia) functioned as a veil dividing mankind from the things above.

Now the eternal realm (aeon) of truth has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it. But its exterior is shadow, which has been called by the name 'darkness'. From it, there appeared a force, presiding over the darkness. And the forces that came into being subsequent to them called the shadow 'the limitless chaos'. From it, every kind of divinity sprouted up [...] together with the entire place, so that also, shadow is posterior to the first product. It was <in> the abyss that it (shadow) appeared, deriving from the aforementioned Pistis.

Then shadow perceived there was something mightier than it, and felt envy; and when it had become pregnant of its own accord, suddenly it engendered jealousy. Since that day, the principle of jealousy amongst all the eternal realms and their worlds has been apparent. Now as for that jealousy, it was found to be an abortion without any spirit in it. Like a shadow, it came into existence in a vast watery substance. Then the bile that had come into being out of the shadow was thrown into a part of chaos. Since that day, a watery substance has been apparent. And what sank within it flowed away, being visible in chaos: as with a woman giving birth to a child - all her superfluities flow out; just so, matter came into being out of shadow, and was projected apart. And it did not depart from chaos; rather, matter was in chaos, being in a part of it.

And when these things had come to pass, then Pistis came and appeared over the matter of chaos, which had been expelled like an aborted fetus - since there was no spirit in it. For all of it (chaos) was limitless darkness and bottomless water. Now when Pistis saw what had resulted from her defect, she became disturbed. And the disturbance appeared, as a fearful product; it rushed to her in the chaos. She turned to it and blew into its face in the abyss, which is below all the heavens.

And when Pistis Sophia desired to cause the thing that had no spirit to be formed into a likeness and to rule over matter and over all her forces, there appeared for the first time a ruler, out of the waters, lion-like in appearance, androgynous, having great authority within him, and ignorant of whence he had come into being. Now when Pistis Sophia saw him moving about in the depth of the waters, she said to him, "Child, pass through to here," whose equivalent is ' '.

Since that day, there appeared the principle of verbal expression, which reached the gods and the angels and mankind. And what came into being as a result of verbal expression, the gods and the angels and mankind finished. Now as for the ruler Yaltabaoth, he is ignorant of the force of Pistis: he did not see her face, rather he saw in the water the likeness that spoke with him. And because of that voice, he called himself 'Yaldabaoth'. But 'Ariael' is what the perfect call him, for he was like a lion. Now when he had come to have authority over matter, Pistis Sophia withdrew up to her light.

When the ruler saw his magnitude - and it was only himself that he saw: he saw nothing else, except for water and darkness - then he supposed that it was he alone who existed. His [...] was completed by verbal expression: it appeared as a spirit moving to and fro upon the waters. And when that spirit appeared, the ruler set apart the watery substance. And what was dry was divided into another place. And from matter, he made for himself an abode, and he called it 'heaven'. And from matter, the ruler made a footstool, and he called it 'earth'.

Next, the ruler had a thought - consistent with his nature - and by means of verbal expression he created an androgyne. He opened his mouth and cooed to him. When his eyes had been opened, he looked at his father, and he said to him, "Eee!" Then his father called him Eee-a-o ('Yao'). Next he created the second son. He cooed to him. And he opened his eyes and said to his father, "Eh!" His father called him 'Eloai'. Next, he created the third son. He cooed to him. And he opened his eyes and said to his father, "Asss!" His father called him 'Astaphaios'. These are the three sons of their father.

Seven appeared in chaos, androgynous. They have their masculine names and their feminine names. The feminine name is Pronoia (Forethought) Sambathas, which is 'week'.
And his son is called Yao: his feminine name is Lordship.
Sabaoth: his feminine name is Deity.
Adonaios: his feminine name is Kingship.
Elaios: his feminine name is Jealousy.
Oraios: his feminine name is Wealth.
And Astaphaios: his feminine name is Sophia (Wisdom).
These are the seven forces of the seven heavens of chaos. And they were born androgynous, consistent with the immortal pattern that existed before them, according to the wish of Pistis: so that the likeness of what had existed since the beginning might reign to the end. You will find the effect of these names and the force of the male entities in the , and the names of the female entities in the first .

Now the prime parent Yaldabaoth, since he possessed great authorities, created heavens for each of his offspring through verbal expression - created them beautiful, as dwelling places - and in each heaven he created great glories, seven times excellent. Thrones and mansions and temples, and also chariots and virgin spirits up to an invisible one and their glories, each one has these in his heaven; mighty armies of gods and lords and angels and archangels - countless myriads - so that they might serve. The account of these matters you will find in a precise manner in the first .

And they were completed from this heaven to as far up as the sixth heaven, namely that of Sophia. The heaven and his earth were destroyed by the troublemaker that was below them all. And the six heavens shook violently; for the forces of chaos knew who it was that had destroyed the heaven that was below them. And when Pistis knew about the breakage resulting from the disturbance, she sent forth her breath and bound him and cast him down into Tartaros. Since that day, the heaven, along with its earth, has consolidated itself through Sophia the daughter of Yaldabaoth, she who is below them all.

Now when the heavens had consolidated themselves along with their forces and all their administration, the prime parent became insolent. And he was honored by all the army of angels. And all the gods and their angels gave blessing and honor to him. And for his part, he was delighted and continually boasted, saying to them, "I have no need of anyone." He said, "It is I who am God, and there is no other one that exists apart from me." And when he said this, he sinned against all the immortal beings who give answer. And they laid it to his charge.

Then when Pistis saw the impiety of the chief ruler, she was filled with anger. She was invisible. She said, "You are mistaken, Samael," (that is, "blind god"). "There is an immortal man of light who has been in existence before you, and who will appear among your modelled forms; he will trample you to scorn, just as potter's clay is pounded. And you will descend to your mother, the abyss, along with those that belong to you. For at the consummation of your (pl.) works, the entire defect that has become visible out of the truth will be abolished, and it will cease to be, and will be like what has never been." Saying this, Pistis revealed her likeness of her greatness in the waters. And so doing, she withdrew up to her light.

Now when Sabaoth, the son of Yaldabaoth, heard the voice of Pistis, he sang praises to her, and he condemned the father [...] at the word of Pistis; and he praised her because she had instructed them about the immortal man and his light. Then Pistis Sophia stretched out her finger and poured upon him some light from her light, to be a condemnation of his father. Then when Sabaoth was illumined, he received great authority against all the forces of chaos. Since that day he has been called "Lord of the Forces".

He hated his father, the darkness, and his mother, the abyss, and loathed his sister, the thought of the prime parent, which moved to and fro upon the waters. And because of his light, all the authorities of chaos were jealous of him. And when they had become disturbed, they made a great war in the seven heavens. Then when Pistis Sophia had seen the war, she dispatched seven archangels to Sabaoth from her light. They snatched him up to the seventh heaven. They stood before him as attendants. Furthermore, she sent him three more archangels, and established the kingdom for him over everyone, so that he might dwell above the twelve gods of chaos.

Now when Sabaoth had taken up the place of repose in return for his repentance, Pistis also gave him her daughter Zoe (Life), together with great authority, so that she might instruct him about all things that exist in the eighth heaven. And as he had authority, he made himself first of all a mansion. It is huge, magnificent, seven times as great as all those that exist in the seven heavens.

And before his mansion he created a throne, which was huge and was upon a four-faced chariot called "Cherubin". Now the Cherubin has eight shapes per each of the four corners, lion forms and calf forms and human forms and eagle forms, so that all the forms amount to sixty-four forms - and seven archangels that stand before it; he is the eighth, and has authority. All the forms amount to seventy-two. Furthermore, from this chariot the seventy-two gods took shape; they took shape so that they might rule over the seventy-two languages of the peoples. And by that throne he created other, serpent-like angels, called "Seraphin", which praise him at all times.

Thereafter he created a congregation of angels, thousands and myriads, numberless, which resembled the congregation in the eighth heaven; and a firstborn called

Israel - which is, "the man that sees God"; and another being, called Jesus Christ, who resembles the savior above in the eighth heaven, and who sits at his right upon a revered throne. And at his left, there sits the virgin of the holy spirit, upon a throne and glorifying him. And the seven virgins stand before her, [...] possessing thirty harps, and psalteries and trumpets, glorifying him. And all the armies of the angels glorify him, and they bless him. Now where he sits is upon a throne of light <within a> great cloud that covers him. And there was no one with him in the cloud except Sophia <the daughter of> Pistis, instructing him about all the things that exist in the eighth heaven, so that the likenesses of those things might be created, in order that his reign might endure until the consummation of the heavens of chaos and their forces.

Now Pistis Sophia set him apart from the darkness and summoned him to her right, and the prime parent she put at her left. Since that day, right has been called justice, and left called wickedness. Now because of this, they all received a realm in the congregation of justice and wickedness, [...] stand [...] upon a creature [...] all.

Thus, when the prime parent of chaos saw his son Sabaoth and the glory that he was in, and perceived that he was greatest of all the authorities of chaos, he envied him. And having become wrathful, he engendered Death out of his death: and he (viz., Death) was established over the sixth heaven, <for> Sabaoth had been snatched up from there. And thus the number of the six authorities of chaos was achieved. Then Death, being androgynous, mingled with his (own) nature and begot seven androgynous offspring. These are the names of the male ones: Jealousy, Wrath, Tears, Sighing, Suffering, Lamentation, Bitter Weeping. And these are the names of the female ones: Wrath, Pain, Lust, Sighing, Curse, Bitterness, Quarrelsomeness. They had intercourse with one another, and each one begot seven, so that they amount to forty-nine androgynous demons. Their names and their effects you will find in the .

And in the presence of these, Zoe, who was with Sabaoth, created seven good androgynous forces. These are the names of the male ones: the Unenvious, the Blessed, the Joyful, the True, the Unbegrudging, the Beloved, the Trustworthy. Also, as regards the female ones, these are their names: Peace, Gladness, Rejoicing, Blessedness, Truth, Love, Faith (Pistis). And from these are many good and innocent spirits. Their influences and their effects you will find in the .

And having seen the likeness of Pistis in the waters, the prime parent grieved very much, especially when he heard her voice, like the first voice that had called to him out of the waters. And when he knew that it was she who had given a name to him, he sighed. He was ashamed on account of his transgression. And when he had come to know in truth that an immortal man of light had been existing before him, he was greatly disturbed; for he had previously said to all the gods and their angels, "It is I who am god. No other one exists apart from me." For he had been afraid they might know that another had been in existence before him, and might condemn him. But he, being devoid of understanding, scoffed at the condemnation and acted recklessly. He said, "If anything has existed before me, let it appear, so that we may see its light."

And immediately, behold! Light came out of the eighth heaven above and passed through all of the heavens of the earth. When the prime parent saw that the light was beautiful as it radiated, he was amazed. And he was greatly ashamed. As that light appeared, a human likeness appeared within it, very wonderful. And no one saw it except for the prime parent and Pronoia, who was with him. Yet its light appeared to all the forces of the heavens. Because of this they were all troubled by it.

Then when Pronoia saw that emissary, she became enamored of him. But he hated her because she was on the darkness. But she desired to embrace him, and she was not able to. When she was unable to assuage her love, she poured out her light upon the earth. Since that day, that emissary has been called "Adam of Light," whose rendering is "the luminous man of blood," and the earth spread over him, holy Adaman, whose rendering is "the Holy Land of Adamantine." Since that day, all the authorities have honored the blood of the virgin. And the earth was purified on account of the blood of the virgin. But most of all, the water was purified through the likeness of Pistis Sophia, who had appeared to the prime parent in the waters. Justly, then, it has been said: "through the waters." The holy water, since it vivifies the all, purifies it.

Out of that first blood Eros appeared, being androgynous. His masculinity is Himireris, being fire from the light. His femininity that is with him - a soul of blood - is from the stuff of Pronoia. He is very lovely in his beauty, having a charm beyond all the creatures of chaos. Then all the gods and their angels, when they beheld Eros, became enamored of him. And appearing in all of them, he set them afire: just as from a single lamp many lamps are lit, and one and the same light is there, but the lamp is not diminished. And in this way, Eros became dispersed in all the created beings of chaos, and was not diminished. Just as from the midpoint of light and darkness Eros appeared and at the midpoint of the angels and mankind the sexual union of Eros was consummated, so out of the earth the primal pleasure blossomed. The woman followed earth. And marriage followed woman. Birth followed marriage. Dissolution followed birth.

After that Eros, the grapevine sprouted up out of that blood, which had been shed over the earth. Because of this, those who drink of it conceive the desire of sexual union. After the grapevine, a fig tree and a pomegranate tree sprouted up from the earth, together with the rest of the trees, all species, having with them their seed from the seed of the authorities and their angels.

Then Justice created Paradise, being beautiful and being outside the orbit of the moon and the orbit of the sun in the Land of Wantonness, in the East in the midst of the stones. And desire is in the midst of the beautiful, appetizing trees. And the tree of eternal life is as it appeared by God's will, to the north of Paradise, so that it might make eternal the souls of the pure, who shall come forth from the modelled forms of poverty at the consummation of the age. Now the color of the tree of life is like the sun. And its branches are beautiful. Its leaves are like those of the cypress. Its fruit is like a bunch of grapes when it is white. Its height goes as far as heaven. And next to it (is) the tree of knowledge ( ), having the strength of God. Its glory is like the moon when fully radiant. And its branches are beautiful. Its leaves are like fig leaves. Its fruit is like a good appetizing date. And this tree is to the north of Paradise, so that it might arouse the souls from the torpor of the demons, in order that they might approach the tree of life and eat of its fruit, and so condemn the authorities and their angels. The effect of this tree is described in the , to wit: "It is you who are the tree of knowledge, which is in Paradise, from which the first man ate and which opened his mind; and he loved his female counterpart and condemned the other, alien likenesses and loathed them."

Now after it, the olive tree sprouted up, which was to purify the kings and the high priests of righteousness, who were to appear in the last days, since the olive tree appeared out of the light of the first Adam for the sake of the unguent that they were to receive.

And the first soul ( ) loved Eros, who was with her, and poured her blood upon him and upon the earth. And out of that blood the rose first sprouted up, out of the earth, out of the thorn bush, to be a source of joy for the light that was to appear in the bush. Moreover, after this the beautiful, good-smelling flowers sprouted up from the earth, different kinds, from every single virgin of the daughters of Pronoia. And they, when they had become enamored of Eros, poured out their blood upon him and upon the earth. After these, every plant sprouted up from the earth, different kinds, containing the seed of the authorities and their angels. After these, the authorities created out of the waters all species of beast, and the reptiles and birds - different kinds - containing the seed of the authorities and their angels.

But before all these, when he had appeared on the first the first day, he remained upon the earth, something like two days, and left the lower Pronoia in heaven, and ascended towards his light. And immediately darkness covered all the universe. Now when she wished, the Sophia who was in the lower heaven received authority from Pistis, and fashioned great luminous bodies and all the stars. And she put them in the sky to shine upon the earth and to render temporal signs and seasons and years and months and days and nights and moments and so forth. And in this way the entire region upon the sky was adorned.

Now when Adam of Light conceived the wish to enter his light - i.e., the eighth heaven - he was unable to do so because of the poverty that had mingled with his light. Then he created for himself a vast eternal realm. And within that eternal realm he created six eternal realms and their adornments, six in number, that were seven times better than the heavens of chaos and their adornments. Now all these eternal realms and their adornments exist within the infinity that is between the eighth heaven and the chaos below it, being counted with the universe that belongs to poverty. If you want to know the arrangement of these, you will find it written in the .

And before Adam of Light had withdrawn in the chaos, the authorities saw him and laughed at the prime parent because he had lied when he said, "It is I who am God. No one exists before me." When they came to him, they said, "Is this not the god who ruined our work?" He answered and said, "Yes. If you do not want him to be able to ruin our work, come let us create a man out of earth, according to the image of our body and according to the likeness of this being, to serve us; so that when he sees his likeness, he might become enamored of it. No longer will he ruin our work; rather,we shall make those who are born out of the light our servants for all the duration of this eternal realm." Now all of this came to pass according to the forethought of Pistis, in order that man should appear after his likeness, and should condemn them because of their modelled form. And their modelled form became an enclosure of the light.

Then the authorities received the knowledge ( ) necessary to create man. Sophia Zoe - she who is with Sabaoth - had anticipated them. And she laughed at their decision. For they are blind: against their own interests they ignorantly created him. And they do not realize what they are about to do. The reason she anticipated them and made her own man first, was in order that he might instruct their modelled form how to despise them, and thus to escape from them.

Now the production of the instructor came about as follows. When Sophia let fall a droplet of light, it flowed onto the water, and immediately a human being appeared, being androgynous. That droplet she molded first as a female body. Afterwards, using the body she molded it in the likeness of the mother, which had appeared. And he finished it in twelve months. An androgynous human being was produced, whom the Greeks call Hermaphrodites; and whose mother the Hebrews call Eve of Life (Zoe), namely, the female instructor of life. Her offspring is the creature that is lord. Afterwards, the authorities called it "Beast", so that it might lead astray their modelled creatures. The interpretation of "the beast" is "the instructor". For it was found to be the wisest of all beings.

Now, Eve is the first virgin, the one who without a husband bore her first offspring. It is she who served as her own midwife. For this reason she is held to have said:

Now these through the will <...> The souls that were going to enter the modelled forms of the authorities were manifested to Sabaoth and his Christ. And regarding these, the holy voice said, "Multiply and improve! Be lord over all creatures." And it is they who were taken captive, according to their destinies, by the prime parent. And thus they were shut into the prisons of the modelled forms until the consummation of the age.

And at that time, the prime parent then rendered an opinion concerning man to those who were with him. Then each of them cast his sperm into the midst of the navel of the earth. Since that day, the seven rulers have fashioned man with his body resembling their body, but his likeness resembling the man that had appeared to them. His modelling took place by parts, one at a time. And their leader fashioned the brain and the nervous system. Afterwards, he appeared as prior to him. He became a soul-endowed man. And he was called Adam, that is, "father", according to the name of the one that existed before him.

And when they had finished Adam, he abandoned him as an inanimate vessel, since he had taken form like an abortion, in that no spirit was in him. Regarding this thing, when the chief ruler remembered the saying of Pistis, he was afraid lest the true man enter his modelled form and become its lord. For this reason he left his modelled form forty days without soul, and he withdrew and abandoned it. Now on the fortieth day, Sophia Zoe sent her breath into Adam, who had no soul. He began to move upon the ground. And he could not stand up.

Then, when the seven rulers came, they saw him and were greatly disturbed. They went up to him and seized him. And he (viz., the chief ruler) said to the breath within him, "Who are you? And whence did you come hither?" It answered and said, "I have come from the force of the man for the destruction of your work." When they heard, they glorified him, since he gave them respite from the fear and the anxiety in which they found themselves. Then they called that day "Rest", in as much as they had rested from toil. And when they saw that Adam could stand up, they were glad, and they took him and put him in Paradise. And they withdrew up to their heavens.

After the day of rest, Sophia sent her daughter Zoe, being called Eve, as an instructor, in order that she might make Adam, who had no soul, arise, so that those whom he should engender might become containers of light. When Eve saw her male counterpart prostrate, she had pity upon him, and she said, "Adam! Become alive! Arise upon the earth!" Immediately her word became accomplished fact. For Adam, having arisen, suddenly opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said, "You shall be called 'Mother of the Living'. For it is you who have given me life."

Then the authorities were informed that their modelled form was alive and had arisen, and they were greatly troubled. They sent seven archangels to see what had happened. They came to Adam. When they saw Eve talking to him, they said to one another, "What sort of thing is this luminous woman? For she resembles that likeness which appeared to us in the light. Now come, let us lay hold of her and cast her seed into her, so that when she becomes soiled she may not be able to ascend into her light. Rather, those whom she bears will be under our charge. But let us not tell Adam, for he is not one of us. Rather let us bring a deep sleep over him. And let us instruct him in his sleep to the effect that she came from his rib, in order that his wife may obey, and he may be lord over her."

Then Eve, being a force, laughed at their decision. She put mist into their eyes and secretly left her likeness with Adam. She entered the tree of knowledge and remained there. And they pursued her, and she revealed to them that she had gone into the tree and become a tree. Then, entering a great state of fear, the blind creatures fled.

Afterwards, when they had recovered from the daze, they came to Adam; and seeing the likeness of this woman with him, they were greatly disturbed, thinking it was she that was the true Eve. And they acted rashly; they came up to her and seized her and cast their seed upon her. They did so wickedly, defiling not only in natural ways but also in foul ways, defiling first the seal of her voice - that had spoken with them, saying, "What is it that exists before you?" - intending to defile those who might say at the consummation (of the age) that they had been born of the true man through verbal expression. And they erred, not knowing that it was their own body that they had defiled: it was the likeness that the authorities and their angels defiled in every way.

First she was pregnant with Abel, by the first ruler. And it was by the seven authorities and their angels that she bore the other offspring. And all this came to pass according to the forethought of the prime parent, so that the first mother might bear within her every seed, being mixed and being fitted to the fate of the universe and its configurations, and to Justice. A prearranged plan came into effect regarding Eve, so that the modelled forms of the authorities might become enclosures of the light, whereupon it would condemn them through their modelled forms.

Now the first Adam, (Adam) of Light, is spirit-endowed and appeared on the first day. The second Adam is soul-endowed and appeared on the sixth day, which is called Aphrodite. The third Adam is a creature of the earth, that is, the man of the law, and he appeared on the eighth day [...] the tranquility of poverty, which is called "The Day of the Sun" (Sunday). And the progeny of the earthly Adam became numerous and was completed, and produced within itself every kind of scientific information of the soul-endowed Adam. But all were in ignorance.

Next, let me say that once the rulers had seen him and the female creature who was with him erring ignorantly like beasts, they were very glad. When they learned that the immortal man was not going to neglect them, rather that they would even have to fear the female creature that had turned into a tree, they were disturbed, and said, "Perhaps this is the true man - this being who has brought a fog upon us and has taught us that she who was soiled is like him - and so we shall be conquered!"

Then the seven of them together laid plans. They came up to Adam and Eve timidly: they said to him, "The fruit of all the trees created for you in Paradise shall be eaten; but as for the tree of knowledge, control yourselves and do not eat from it. If you eat, you will die." Having imparted great fear to them, they withdrew up to their authorities.

Then came the wisest of all creatures, who was called Beast. And when he saw the likeness of their mother Eve he said to her, "What did God say to you? Was it 'Do not eat from the tree of knowledge'?" She said, "He said not only, 'Do not eat from it', but, 'Do not touch it, lest you die.'" He said to her, "Do not be afraid. In death you shall not die. For he knows that when you eat from it, your intellect will become sober and you will come to be like gods, recognizing the difference that obtains between evil men and good ones. Indeed, it was in jealousy that he said this to you, so that you would not eat from it."

Now Eve had confidence in the words of the instructor. She gazed at the tree and saw that it was beautiful and appetizing, and liked it; she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she gave some also to her husband, and he too ate it. Then their intellect became open. For when they had eaten, the light of knowledge had shone upon them. When they clothed themselves with shame, they knew that they were naked of knowledge. When they became sober, they saw that they were naked and became enamored of one another. When they saw that the ones who had modelled them had the form of beasts, they loathed them: they were very aware.

Then when the rulers knew that they had broken their commandments, they entered Paradise and came to Adam and Eve with earthquake and great threatening, to see the effect of the aid. Then Adam and Eve trembled greatly and hid under the trees in Paradise. Then the rulers did not know where they were and said, "Adam, where are you?" He said, "I am here, for through fear of you I hid, being ashamed." And they said to him ignorantly, "Who told you about the shame with which you clothed yourself? - unless you have eaten from that tree!" He said, "The woman whom you gave me - it is she that gave to me and I ate." Then they said to the latter, "What is this that you have done?" She answered and said, "It is the instructor who urged me on, and I ate."

Then the rulers came up to the instructor. Their eyes became misty because of him, and they could not do anything to him. They cursed him, since they were powerless. Afterwards, they came up to the woman and cursed her and her offspring. After the woman, they cursed Adam, and the land because of him, and the crops; and all things they had created, they cursed. They have no blessing. Good cannot result from evil.

From that day, the authorities knew that truly there was something mightier than they: they recognized only that their commandments had not been kept. Great jealousy was brought into the world solely because of the immortal man. Now when the rulers saw that their Adam had entered into an alien state of knowledge, they desired to test him, and they gathered together all the domestic animals and the wild beasts of the earth and the birds of heaven and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. When he saw them, he gave names to their creatures.

They became troubled because Adam had recovered from all the trials. They assembled and laid plans, and they said, "Behold Adam! He has come to be like one of us, so that he knows the difference between the light and the darkness. Now perhaps he will be deceived, as in the case of the Tree of Knowledge, and also will come to the Tree of Life and eat from it, and become immortal, and become lord, and despise us and disdain us and all our glory! Then he will denounce us along with our universe. Come, let us expel him from Paradise, down to the land from which he was taken, so that henceforth he might not be able to recognize anything better than we can." And so they expelled Adam from Paradise, along with his wife. And this deed that they had done was not enough for them. Rather, they were afraid. They went in to the Tree of Life and surrounded it with great fearful things, fiery living creatures called "Cheroubin", and they put a flaming sword in their midst, fearfully twirling at all times, so that no earthly being might ever enter that place.

Thereupon, since the rulers were envious of Adam they wanted to diminish their (viz., Adam's and Eve's) lifespans. They could not (, however,) because of fate, which had been fixed since the beginning. For to each had been allotted a lifespan of 1,000 years, according to the course of the luminous bodies. But although the rulers could not do this, each of the evildoers took away ten years. And all this lifespan (which remained) amounted to 930 years: and these are in pain and weakness and evil distraction. And so life has turned out to be, from that day until the consummation of the age.

Thus when Sophia Zoe saw that the rulers of the darkness had laid a curse upon her counterparts, she was indignant. And coming out of the first heaven with full power, she chased those rulers out of their heavens, and cast them down into the sinful world, so that there they should dwell, in the form of evil spirits (demons) upon the earth.

[...], so that in their world it might pass the thousand years in Paradise - a soul-endowed living creature called "phoenix". It kills itself and brings itself to life as a witness to the judgment against them, for they did wrong to Adam and his generation, unto the consummation of the age. There are [...] three men, and also his posterities, unto the consummation of the world: the spirit-endowed of eternity, and the soul-endowed, and the earthly. Likewise, the three phoenixes <in> Paradise - the first is immortal; the second lives 1,000 years; as for the third, it is written in the that it is consumed. So, too, there are three baptisms - the first is the spiritual, the second is by fire, the third is by water. Just as the phoenix appears as a witness concerning the angels, so the case of the water hydri in Egypt, which has been a witness to those going down into the baptism of a true man. The two bulls in Egypt possess a mystery, the sun and the moon, being a witness to Sabaoth: namely, that over them Sophia received the universe; from the day that she made the sun and the moon, she put a seal upon her heaven, unto eternity.

And the worm that has been born out of the phoenix is a human being as well. It is written (Ps 91:13 LXX) concerning it, "the just man will blossom like a phoenix". And the phoenix first appears in a living state, and dies, and rises again, being a sign of what has become apparent at the consummation of the age. It was only in Egypt that these great signs appeared - nowhere else - as an indication that it is like God's Paradise.

Let us return to the aforementioned rulers, so that we may offer some explanation of them. Now, when the seven rulers were cast down from their heavens onto the earth, they made for themselves angels, numerous, demonic, to serve them. And the latter instructed mankind in many kinds of error and magic and potions and worship of idols and spilling of blood and altars and temples and sacrifices and libations to all the spirits of the earth, having their coworker fate, who came into existence by the concord between the gods of injustice and justice.

And thus when the world had come into being, it distractedly erred at all times. For all men upon earth worshiped the spirits (demons) from the creation to the consummation - both the angels of righteousness and the men of unrighteousness. Thus did the world come to exist in distraction, in ignorance, and in a stupor. They all erred, until the appearance of the true man.

Let this suffice so far as the matter goes. Now we shall proceed to consideration of our world, so that we may accurately finish the description of its structure and management. Then it will become obvious how belief in the unseen realm, which has been apparent from creation down to the consummation of the age, was discovered.

I come, therefore, to the main points regarding the immortal man: I shall speak of all the beings that belong to him, explaining how they happen to be here.

When a multitude of human beings had come into existence, through the parentage of the Adam who had been fashioned, and out of matter, and when the world had already become full, the rulers were master over it - that is, they kept it restrained by ignorance. For what reason? For the following: since the immortal father knows that a deficiency of truth came into being amongst the eternal realms and their universe, when he wished to bring to naught the rulers of perdition through the creatures they had modelled, he sent your likenesses down into the world of perdition, namely, the blessed little innocent spirits. They are not alien to knowledge. For all knowledge is vested in one angel who appeared before them; he is not without power in the company of the father. And <he> gave them knowledge. Whenever they appear in the world of perdition, immediately and first of all they reveal the pattern of imperishability as a condemnation of the rulers and their forces. Thus when the blessed beings appeared in forms modelled by authorities, they were envied. And out of envy the authorities mixed their seed with them, in hopes of polluting them. They could not. Then when the blessed beings appeared in luminous form, they appeared in various ways. And each one of them, starting out in his land, revealed his (kind of) knowledge to the visible church constituted of the modelled forms of perdition. It (viz., the church) was found to contain all kinds of seed, because of the seed of the authorities that had mixed with it.

Then the Savior created [...] of them all - and the spirits of these are manifestly superior, being blessed and varying in election - and also (he created) many other beings, which have no king and are superior to everyone that was before them. Consequently, four races exist. There are three that belong to the kings of the eighth heaven. But the fourth race is kingless and perfect, being the highest of all. For these shall enter the holy place of their father. And they will gain rest in repose and eternal, unspeakable glory and unending joy. Moreover, they are kings within the mortal domain, in that they are immortal. They will condemn the gods of chaos and their forces.

Now the Word that is superior to all beings was sent for this purpose alone: that he might proclaim the unknown. He said, "There is nothing hidden that is not apparent, and what has not been recognized will be recognized." And these were sent to make known what is hidden, and the seven authorities of chaos and their impiety. And thus they were condemned to death.

So when all the perfect appeared in the forms modelled by the rulers, and when they revealed the incomparable truth, they put to shame all the wisdom of the gods. And their fate was found to be a condemnation. And their force dried up. Their lordship was dissolved. Their forethought became emptiness, along with their glory.

Before the consummation of the age, the whole place will shake with great thundering. Then the rulers will be sad, [...] their death. The angels will mourn for their mankind, and the demons will weep over their seasons, and their mankind will wail and scream at their death. Then the age will begin, and they will be disturbed. Their kings will be intoxicated with the fiery sword, and they will wage war against one another, so that the earth is intoxicated with bloodshed. And the seas will be disturbed by those wars. Then the sun will become dark, and the moon will cause its light to cease. The stars of the sky will cancel their circuits. And a great clap of thunder will come out of a great force that is above all the forces of chaos, where the firmament of the woman is situated. Having created the first product, she will put away the wise fire of intelligence and clothe herself with witless wrath. Then she will pursue the gods of chaos, whom she created along with the prime parent. She will cast them down into the abyss. They will be obliterated because of their wickedness. For they will come to be like volcanoes and consume one another until they perish at the hand of the prime parent. When he has destroyed them, he will turn against himself and destroy himself until he ceases to exist.

And their heavens will fall one upon the next and their forces will be consumed by fire. Their eternal realms, too, will be overturned. And his heaven will fall and break in two. His [...] will fall down upon the [...] support them; they will fall into the abyss, and the abyss will be overturned.

The light will [...] the darkness and obliterate it: it will be like something that has never been. And the product to which the darkness had been posterior will dissolve. And the deficiency will be plucked out by the root (and thrown) down into the darkness. And the light will withdraw up to its root. And the glory of the unbegotten will appear. And it will fill all the eternal realm.

When the prophecy and the account of those that are king becomes known and is fulfilled by those who are called perfect, those who - in contrast - have not become perfect in the unbegotten father will receive their glory in their realms and in the kingdoms of the immortals: but they will never enter the kingless realm. For everyone must go to the place from which he has come. Indeed, by his acts and his knowledge, each person will make his (own) nature known.

 

 

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for a complete selection of translations and books about the Gnostic Gospels.

1590s, "trial, attempt, endeavor," also "short, discursive literary composition" (first attested in writings of Francis Bacon, probably in imitation of Montaigne), from French essai "trial, attempt, essay" (in Old French from 12c.), from Late Latin exagium "a weighing, a weight," from Latin exigere "drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test," from ex "out" (see ex- ) + agere "to set in motion, drive" (from PIE root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move") apparently meaning here "to weigh." The suggestion is of unpolished writing. Compare assay , also examine .

"to put to proof, test the mettle of," late 15c., from French essaier , from essai "trial, attempt" (see essay (n.)). This sense has mostly gone with the divergent spelling assay . Meaning "to attempt" is from 1640s. Related: Essayed ; essaying .

Entries linking to essay

c. 1300, "to try, endeavor, strive; test the quality of," from Anglo-French assaier , from assai (n.), from Old French assai , variant of essai "trial" (see essay (n.)). Related: Assayed ; assaying .

c. 1300, "put (someone) to question in regard to knowledge, competence, or skill, inquire into qualifications or capabilities;" mid-14c., "inspect or survey (something) carefully, scrutinize, view or observe in all aspects with the purpose of forming a correct opinion or judgment," from Old French examiner "interrogate, question, torture," from Latin examinare "to test or try; consider, ponder," literally "to weigh," from examen "a means of weighing or testing," probably ultimately from exigere "demand, require, enforce," literally "to drive or force out," also "to finish, measure," from ex "out" (see ex- ) + agere "to set in motion, drive, drive forward; to do, perform" (from PIE root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move"). Legal sense of "question or hear (a witness in court)" is from early 15c. Related: Examined ; examining .

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Essay on Our World

Students are often asked to write an essay on Our World in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Our World

What is our world.

Our world is the place where we live. It is a big ball floating in space. It has land, water, air, and many kinds of plants and animals. People live all over the world in different countries.

The Land and Seas

The world has seven big pieces of land called continents. Between these lands are oceans. The land has mountains, valleys, and flat areas. The seas are deep and full of fish and other sea creatures.

Weather and Climate

Our world has different kinds of weather. Some places are hot, some are cold. Rain, snow, and sunshine happen because of the weather. Climate is what the weather is like over a long time.

People and Cultures

Many people live on Earth. They speak different languages and have different traditions. This is called culture. People eat different foods, wear different clothes, and celebrate different festivals.

Animals and Plants

250 words essay on our world, our beautiful planet.

Our world is a wonderful place. It is full of different lands, waters, and skies. The Earth is the third planet from the sun and the only place we know that has life. It has seven big land parts called continents and five large water parts called oceans.

The Variety of Life

Many types of living things call Earth their home. From tiny bugs to huge whales, life is everywhere. Trees and plants grow in many places and help make the air we breathe. Animals live on land, in water, and in the air. People live all over the world in cities, towns, and villages.

The Changing Seasons

Our world has seasons because our planet tilts as it goes around the sun. Some places have four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each season has its own kind of weather and changes in nature. In spring, flowers bloom. Summer brings warmth and sunshine. Fall makes leaves change color. Winter covers many places with snow.

Our Shared Home

Earth is a shared home for all of us. We must take care of it. This means not littering, recycling, and saving water. Everyone can help, even kids. By taking care of our world, we make sure it stays beautiful and safe for all living things, including us, for a very long time.

500 Words Essay on Our World

Our world is a wonderful place filled with all sorts of amazing things. It’s like a giant home that we all share with people, animals, plants, and many other living things. The world has different parts, like the land where we walk and build houses, the sky where birds fly and clouds float, and the oceans that have fish and other sea creatures.

The Blue Oceans

Our planet is mostly covered by water, which is why it looks blue from space. The oceans are home to thousands of creatures, from tiny fish to huge whales. The water in the oceans also helps to keep our world’s climate just right, so it’s not too hot or too cold. We also use the oceans to travel from one place to another and to find food.

The Sky Above Us

When we look up, we see the sky. During the day, it’s bright because of the sun, which gives us light and warmth. At night, the sky changes and becomes dark, but it’s still beautiful with the moon and stars. The sky also gives us weather, which can be sunny, rainy, or snowy.

Living Things

Taking care of our world.

It’s important to take care of our world because it’s the only one we have. We need to make sure that we don’t harm the environment. This means not polluting the air and water, and not cutting down too many trees. We should also try to use less energy by doing simple things like turning off lights when we’re not using them.

Learning and Exploring

There’s so much to learn about our world. By reading books, going to school, and talking to different people, we can learn about other cultures and places. Exploring can be as simple as visiting a park near your home or as big as traveling to another country.

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Expertly Written Essay On The Origin Of The World To Follow

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: The World , World , Being , Women , Myths , Coyote , Origin , Creation

Published: 05/23/2023

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Different people from various backgrounds hold diverse beliefs on the origin of the world. Lewis, for instance, had the belief that the root of the world was from the darkness and beautiful distant sounds like those that emanate from far away singers. The Ohlone individuals in San Francisco believe that the head being was Coyote who created the world. The people influenced by Genesis hold that the world came being from the fall of refinement. Bestowing to the Pomo on the other side, a tribe in Northern California, the sphere was molded when a god set rolling the wax in his armpit to form a ball. This paper gives a summary of the different versions that are in existence concerning the origin of the world. It further presents various aspects that are common to the communities. According to the Cahuilla people, darkness, and pleasant distant sounds gave rise to the world. The sounds are described as those of singers in a far away place. This tribe is among the numerous minor tribes that lived in the vast region, which currently known as California. This tribe held that the parental darkness undertakes to produce an offspring and fall short two times, then gives birth to twin boys who develop to argue continuously concerning who between them came first. The twins always argue on whether death and sickness should be in existence. The arguments come forth as a result of them envisioning about the world and its components. After the discussion, the winner gets concerned about the world being overpopulated. The loser immediately and in a temper leaves the earth, shake off his creations which comprise of the coyotes, flies, and palm trees. The brother who stays behind lusts after the moon which are his daughter gives poisonous fangs to the rattlesnakes and provides weapons to the population. This results to his creatures wanting to kill him. In such a formation, righteousness does not exist. Not even the gods are indisputably real. The belief of Coyote being a part of the creation that was left behind by the twin is considered as wrong in the Bay Area in San Francisco. The Ohlone populace trusts that Coyote was not left behind. Instead, he was the first being, and that created the world assisted by Eagle and Humming bad who consistently made fun of Coyote’s efforts to govern the place to make his wife pregnant. The fact that Coyote could not make a decision on the location to impregnate his wife saw the origin of the phrase “Coyote is not disposed to tell apart good from evil. To the contrary, he is filled with transmissible excitement and great inventive power. A creation myth from California holds that the gods do not agree on procreation. One holds that a man and a woman should place a stick in the middle of them, which will transform to a baby in the morning. The other one says that during the baby making process, the man and his wife should embrace and laugh. Amid the creation stories, is Jazz- an Old Testament creator and a legendary performer whose mark can be achieved only one correct way. He holds that the reason as to why humankind was kicked out of the Garden was Eden was because the woman held a conversation with snakes and made the wrong decision on the choice of fruits, which lead to curses and infirmity. The decision made by the woman brought forth a standard measure of what is good and what is not. Perfection is the standard by which an act is considered right or wrong. Majority individuals are influenced by Genesis. From the Genesis, the idea of a Garden of Eden is brought forth. Looking at the Garden of Eden socially, conservatives and liberals have different perspectives on the same. According to the conservatives, Eden comes before the fall, while the Liberals tell of a particular time when existence was free from corruption. The myths across different societies are different in one way or the other. Certain aspects, however, are common. First, the presence of a first being is universal in all the myths, whether as a human being or an animal. The original being brings a sense of commonness on the origin of the world and links the different myths. Secondly, irrespective of how some the myths may sound ridiculous, the communities that believe in them do respect them and hold them to a high degree. Mockery or doubt is not experienced in such societies since they trust that anybody that disrespects the myths deserve to be punished. Thirdly, perfection is a virtue that is present across the cultures. It is used as a standard measure of what is good and bad. If an act is not perfect, then it is not considered as virtuous in some societies.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs and opinions. I, however, believe that the Bible sheds light into the creation of the sphere. A supernatural being must have engineered its creation. The introduction of education to some of the communities played a crucial role in passing the required knowledge concerning the origin of the world. Irrespective of the different views, everyone acknowledges the existence of an initial supernatural being who is the creator of the world. In different places across the world, creation mythologies help people understand the origin of the world and its components. While numerous disparities exist, these divisions have fabricated the basis of the world’s biggest beliefs and cultures. There may not be a collective indulgent but these myths, accurate or fabricated, are the actual origins of society in the present day.

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English Essay | Origin and Development

Origin and Development of English Essay 

Introduction.

The Essay is one of the most remarkable and attractive forms of English Literature . It is a species of prose composition which resembles a short story in size. Both the essay and the short story are written keeping in mind a definite aim and purpose and when it is fulfilled, they are finished. But both are independent and different in form and manner. One chapter of a long philosophical or literary treatise cannot be called an essay, as a chapter of a novel cannot be called a short story.

Essay Definition

No elaborate and complete definition of the essay has been given so far. It is considered as a composition comparatively short, incomplete and unsystematic. Dr. Johnson defined the essay as

“a loose sally of the mind, an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly composition.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, giving it a more uniform shape, defined it as

“a composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject; originally implying want of finish – (‘an irregular indigested piece’ – Johnson), but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

These definitions are too vague and narrow to cover essays like Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding . We have essays in verse also such as Essay on Criticism , Essay on Man of Alexander Pope.

Hudson, giving a definition of the essay says:

“The essay, then may be regarded, roughly, as a composition on any topic, the chief negative features of which are comparative brevity and comparative want of exhaustiveness.”

Keeping in mind these two features Crabbe thinks that it is very easy to write essays, because it is essentially superficial in character. But Sainte-Beauve does not agree with this view. He considers it to be the most difficult, as well as delightful form of literary expression because of its brevity and condensation.

The true essay is essentially personal. It is a subjective form of composition like the lyric in poetry . The true essay is a gateway to enter the mind and personality of the writer. The mind of the essayist moves here and there in a rather aimless fashion within the limits of his subject and does not search for depth and profundity.

“A good essay”, says É.V. Lucas, “more than a novel, a poem, a play, or a treatise, is personality translated into print : between the lines must gleam attractive features or we remain cold.”

The essay proper, therefore, is not merely a short analysis of a subject, not a mere epitome, but rather a picture of the writer’s mind as he is affected for the moment by the subject which he is dealing. Montaigne, the first man to write essays so called, was also a personal writer. He said:

“I am the subject of my essays because I myself am the only person whom I know well.”

The essay has a vast scope of subjects. “Apparently there is no subject, from the stars of dust-heap and from the amoeba to man, which may not be dealt within an essay” (Hugh Walker). An essay by Bacon consists of informative knowledge and worldly wisdom; an essay by Addison is thin in thought and diluted, sometimes there is personal gossip and sometimes light didacticism; Lock’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is formal, ponderous and systematic and full of philosophic principles; the essays of Macaulay are small books. While Bacon deals with philosophical subjects like truth, death and studies, Lamb can write on such small subjects as old and new schoolmasters, chimney sweepers and roast pigs.

It is generally believed that Montaigne (a Frenchman) was the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. But the roots of his writing lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to the Roman writer Cicero, who in his turn was indebted to Plato. Bacon was the first English writer who transplanted the essay into England, although he followed a different line from Montaigne. The aim of Montaigne was self-revelation, and he was the father of the subjective or the personal essay. Bacon gave it an objective or impersonal turn and made his essay the detached musings of a philosopher.

Essay before Francis Bacon

The foundation of the essay can be traced to ancient Greece and Rome, though it did not flourish there. The French writer, Montaigne, has been given the honour of being the first man to write essays. His prose compositions were written under the name of ‘essais.’ Montaigne’s essays are an attempt to weave out his personal thoughts with an artistic thread. In his essays he describes his personal feelings and experiences Addison aptly remarks: “The most eminent egoist that ever appeared in the world was Montaigne”. His essays are highly subjective and charming.

As Bacon said: “There are certain hollow blasts of wind and secret swellings as seas before a tempest” : in the same way there are certain anticipations of the essay before the formation of its proper form. In fact the Elizabethan age sees the foundation of an English prose style. Before that the earlier specimens have been experimental or totally imitative. Though the age of Elizabeth was essentially poetic and drama became almost an obsession, yet experiments in prose were also carried on. The English tongue was ripe for a prose style. The essay in its beginning developed on three different lines the character-writers of the seventeenth century, the critical prose and the controversial writings.

The character-writers were highly influenced by Theophrastus. These writers depicted with sharpness, humour and satiric touches various types of humanity. Joseph Hall’s Characters of virtues and Vices is written with acuteness in a satirical style. Thomas Overbury survives in literature as the author of A Series of characters based on the ancient Greek book of Theophrastus. It consists of various concise character-sketches as, Milkmaid, Pedant and Franklin etc. John Stephens with his Microcosmography followed this example. Sometimes later Samuel Butler drew the characters of a modern statesman, a mathematician and a romantic writer. Dekker’s Bellman of London introduced several kinds of rogues.

In criticism Caxton’s prefaces may be regarded as early essays in the art. Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric does not come within the limits of essays due to its length and elaboration. Gascoigne’s Note of instruction Concerning the Making of Verse consists of essays.

In the field of polemics Gosson’s School of Abuse which provoked Sidney’s famous Apology for Poetry , is the first document. It is violent and one-sided. Thomas Lodge refuted it in a pamphlet which is not valuable as a critical work. Philip Sidney’s Apology for poetry is “the only critical piece of the sixteenth century which may still be read with pleasure by that vague personage, ‘The general reader.’ (Hugh Walker). Sir George Harrington and George Chapman in their prefaces developed the critical essay. Thomas Nash was a noted controversialist of the period.

Development of the English Essay

Francis bacon.

Bacon’s position in the history of English essay is unique. To him belongs the credit of having written essays first of all in the English language. As Hugh Walker says:

“Although a few of Nash’s tracts may fairly be classed as essays, it is obvious that he did not conceive of himself to be imitating a new fashion of writing. Nor did he in fact do so. Neither did the critics. Still less the forerunners of the character-writers be described as the founders of the essay: they are too unformed and non-literary, Dekker, the successor of Nash and his superior, comes chronologically after Bacon. The latter consequently is the first of the English essayists, as he remains, for sheer mass and weight, of genius, the greatest.”

The general conception of the essay in Bacon was taken from Montaigne whose essays appeared seventeen years before the earliest essays of Bacon. Bacon thought that this form of writing was suitable to his genius and disposition. He speaks of his essays as dispersed meditations’. They are really the outcome of a philosopher’s or thinker’s mind and experience. He took all knowledge for his province. To a man of Bacon’s temperament and accomplishments, with his discursive interests and encyclopedic range, of mind and his thriftiness of time, the essay was a god-send. He wrote his essays in an aphoristic style.

Bacon considered these great essays merely recreation in comparison with his more serious studies. But he was conscious of their popularity. He wrote to Andrews, Bishop of Winchester, in 1622: “I am not ignorant that those kinds of writings would, with less pains and embracements (perhaps), yield more lustre and reputation to my name than those others which I have in hand.” Bacon realised that his essays will “come home to men’s business and bosoms.” On account of their popularity they were translated into French, Latin and Italian languages.

Bacon’s essays are not personal in tone; they are not the confidential chat of a great philosopher. These essays are stately and profound. His essays are not an attempt to communicate a soul like Montaigne’s. Those critics, who acknowledge that the true essay is essentially personal, point out his inferiority in that respect. He lacks true personal touch and the intimate confidence of Charles Lamb – the innocent type. Bacon’s maxims are judicious, condensed and weighty. He seems to be looking down with absolute dispassionateness from the pulpit, and determining what course of conduct pays best. John Freeman points out that Bacon is not an intimate but reserved figure, not a talker but a writer, not a babbler but a rhetorician, not a companion but a teacher, not a friend but a great chancellor, not a familiar friend forgetting his dignity but a supple states man asserting it; preferring to suppress, equivocate, and dissemble, and to justify every obliquity- anything rather than candidly pour himself out and leave the justification to the reader.”

There were a few writers, however, in the age of Bacon who continued the personal vein in their essays introduced by Montaigne, and the foremost among them was Ben Jonson, whose forceful personality continually breaks through his Discoveries . Like Montaigne, Ben Jonson’s self-dominates in his writings which imparts a peculiar charm to his essays. Jonson’s style combines lucidity, crispness and force in a degree rivalling Bacon’s.

Abraham Cowley

Cowley cultivated a form of the essay more intimate and confidential, though less profound, weighty and philosophical, than the Baconian. The charm of his essays is largely due to their simple and sincere revelation of self. They are the friendly chat of a thoughtful and reflective spectator of life. Nothing that Cowley has written is more delightful than what he has written directly about himself. Edmund Gosse has described Cowley as the pure essayist, as contra-distinguished from the heavy, condensed and incoherent didacticism of Bacon:

“Cowley, who first understood what Montaigne was bent upon introducing, is a pure essayist, and leads on directly to Steele and Addison, and to Charles Lamb. If we read Cowley’s chapter On Myself , we find contained in it, as in a nutshell, the complete model and style of what an essay should be, – elegant, fresh, confidential, constructed with as much care as a sonnet”.

Essay in The Restoration Age (1660-1700)

John dryden.

Dryden introduced a new variety, called the Critical Essay. Among the earliest of Dryden’s essays was the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), which is still the best known, and contains the most elaborate exposition of his critical principles, though it is surpassed in interest by the admirable Preface to the Fables . These critical essays entitled Dryden to the honour of being not only the father of English criticism” but also “the first master of a prose which is adapted to the everyday needs of expression, and yet has dignity enough to raise to any point of the topmost peaks of eloquence.” Dryden’s style is remarkably free from mannerisms of any kind and its characteristics are lucidity and easy grace. He gave up the long-winded, cumbrous sentences of the earlier prose writers. He used a simple, straightforward, vigorous mode of expressing his meaning,

There were two other writers in the Restoration Age- Sir William Temple and Lord Halifax , who were at once politicians and men of letters and contributed greatly to the development of the English essay. Sir William Temple, a statesman and a diplomat is at his best in the essays Of Gardening and Of Health and Long Life . “In a sense,” says Legouis “Temple is the first classicist; and his clear-cut style, unencumbered, simple, smooth but still compact, symmetrical and yet free from monotony, has almost always the rhythm and finish of the modern prose.” Lamb praises “the plain, natural chit-chat of Temple.” In Macaulay’s opinion “his style is stately and splendid. Temple is confidential and good natured.” Lord Halifax is chiefly known for his famous essay, The Character of a Trimmer . It is written in a masterly style and full of political wisdom.

Essay in the Eighteenth Century

The periodical essay.

The early years of the eighteenth century saw the rise of journalism and the essay began to appear in the periodicals Daniel Defoe’s paper, the Review , first published in 1704, established the periodical essay. “The journalistic essay,” remarks T. G. Williams, “is loose-knit, easy-paced and discursive. Addressed to citizens of the world, it attempts a synthesis of experience, and allows of digression into whatever bypaths seem to answer the writer’s mood.”

The real vogue of the periodical essay, however, began with the publication of The Tatler (1709) and The Spectator (1711). With these two periodicals are inextricably associated the names of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison , acknowledged masters of the periodical essay. Steele started The Tatler with the declared object of exposing “the false arts of life, of pulling off the disguises of cunning, vanity and affectation, and of recommending a general simplicity in dress, discourse and behaviour.” It stopped publication after two years, and was replaced by The Spectator in March, 1711. Over 550 issues of the Spectator appeared before it ceased publication in December, 1712. In this enterprise Steele was associated with Addison. Addison’s aim was to “enliven morality with wit and to temper wit with morality.” He was the master of pleasant humour, delicate irony and satire. His style is the model of the middle style-never loose, or obscure or unmusical.

Steele and Addison were ideally matched as literary partners; each was the exact complement of the other. Steele was rash, erratic and original; Addison prudent, reflective and painstaking. Steele was more inventive than Addison and Addison was more effective than Steele. In some ways Steele was greater than Addison; he was more modest, more warmhearted and more human. As a literary figure, however, though one of the earliest, wisest, and wittiest of English essayists, Steele ranks quite distinctly below Addison.

Among other contributors to the periodicals in the age of Queen Anne may be mentioned Pope (1688-1774) and Swift (1667-1745). Pope’s prose writings are often excellent and he possessed many of the qualities of a periodical essayist . Swift was, however, by nature and temperament unfitted for the work of an essayist. He was a misanthrope and did not possess that breadth of vision which is the essential characteristic of a good essayist. His humour was too grim and sardonic and his intellect too massive for the essay.

Henry Fielding , Dr. Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith followed Addison and Steele’s way. Fielding contributed his essays to The Champion and The Covent Garden Journal . The introductory chapters to the books of his great novel Tom Jones are fine pieces of prose. The earliest works of Dr. Johnson appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine . He himself launched the Rambler and the Idler. His style is bombastic, antithetical and is marked with Latinism. But now-a-days his essays would be read rather as a duty than for pleasure, because he lectures us, whereas with Steele and Addison we feel that we are on equal terms with two friendly men of the world.

Oliver Goldsmith is one of the greatest essayists of the eighteenth century. Many of his essays in The Bee and The Citizen of the World are remarkable for their extraordinary power, boldness and originality. They are written in a style whose wonderful charm has never failed to impress the reader. There is in them an imitable vein of humour which constitutes one of the secrets of his charm.

Essay in the Nineteenth Century

After Goldsmith the periodical essay of the literary type was in decline. In the beginning of the nineteenth century the periodical newspaper gave place to the critical journal, commonly called the Review , It had little concern with social and personal topics; its main purpose was political. In them ample space was devoted to the literary criticism. The most important of these reviews were The Gentlemen’s Magazine , The Edinburgh Review , The Quarterly Review , Blackwood’s Magazine and The London Magazine . They are of special importance in the history of the essay, because, while they have been used for many other purposes, they have been pre-eminently the medium of the essay.

Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) endeared himself to generations of Englishmen by his Essays of Elia (1832) and Last Essays of Elia (1833). Lamb belongs to the intimate and self-revealing essayists, of whom Montaigne is the original, and Cowley the first exponent in England. He has been rightly called ‘the Prince of English Essayists’ because there are essayists like Bacon of more massive greatness, and others like Sir Thomas Browne, who have attained the heights of rhythmic eloquence, but there is no other essayist who has in an equal degree the power to charm. Lamb takes the reader into his confidence and conceals nothing from him. His essays are a living testimony to his sweetness of disposition and gentleness of heart. In his essays humour and pathos are inseparable from each other, they are different facts of his predecessors; they are conversational, lack both restraint and formality and are frequently rhetorical. They are yet nonetheless delightful. They are amusing, paradoxical, ingenious, touching, poetic and eloquent. His “whimwhams”, as he called them, found their best expression in quaint words and antique phrases and sometimes far-fetched, yet never forced comparisons in which he abounds.

Few notable essays of Charles Lamb are- Dream Children: A Reverie , The Superannuated Man etc.

William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) is one of the best essayists of the nineteenth century. His essays are divisible into two classes- essays on literary criticism and essays on miscellaneous subjects. In both spheres he stands very high. His critical essays, although sometimes marred by his extra-literary prejudices, entitle him to be placed in the foremost rank of English critics. His miscellaneous essays are autobiographical, they frankly tell about his temperament, his enthusiasm and his limitations. His style has no blemishes, and is particularly free form mannerisms of all kinds. Like Addison and Dr. Johnson his language is always dignified. Though his place in the history and growth of the English essay is undoubtedly lower than Lamb’s; yet it is certainly higher than of the rest with the possible exception of R. L. Stevenson. His important Essay includes On a Sun-Dial .

Thomas De Quincey

Like Lamb and Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was frankly personal and his best essays are autobiographical. He wrote, however, on a great number of subjects and often so discursively that he never far reached the subjects which he proposed. Though his intellect was acute and subtle, he is at his best when he leaves the world of fact and leads us into his dreams and visions. His greatest contribution to the English essay is his sonorous prose. He brought to his task a magical control of long-drawn and musical cadences.

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) turned to the essayists of the age of Queen Anne for his model; for the qualities he displays are much the same as theirs. But unlike them, he is confidential in tone. It is this intimacy which gives charm to his essays like Coaches and their Horses , Deaths of Little Children , A Visit in the Zoological Garden and Month of May . But Hunt lacked one thing which was requisite to make him a great essayist – mass and weight of thought. Moreover, his style is not a great style, although it is an easy and agreeable one. Like his contemporaries, he has also written critical essays on Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The Essay in the Victorian Age

The Victorian age saw the birth of a new genre, the historical essay . Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) may be looked upon as the founder of this type. Among his essays the best are those which he wrote on English history. He also wrote some biographical essays for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He brought to the composition of his essays a mind that was richly stored with detail, and perfectly clear in its conviction. This allowed him to set forth his theme with a simplicity that avoided every compromise, and this firm outline, once defined, he decorated with every embellishment of allusion and picturesque detail. He has his faults also. He had strong perusal and political prejudices and this often marred the quality of his work. He is often grandiloquent and rhetorical. We also do not find in him the intimacy of personal confidence which is the distinguishing feature of the essays of Elia. As a critic has pointed out: “In the hands of Macaulay the essay ceases to be a confession or an autobiography: it is strictly impersonal; it is literary, historical, or controversial; vigorous, trenchant, and full of party prejudice.” He is merely the essayist-historian. But he was a competent and distinguished reviewer and raised the standard of reviewing considerably.

Thomas Carlyle  

In marked contrast with Macaulay is Thomas Carlyle, the prophet and the censor of the Victorian era. He was a man of extreme honesty and sincerity, and his essays exposed and denounced many of the vices of his age. He was deeply influenced by German philosophy. His essays are critical, biographical, historical, social and political. His style is remarkable for its strength and tempestuous force. He can sometimes command a beauty of expression that deeply touches the heart, and can attain a piercing melody, wistful and moving that is almost lyrical

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold tended to mould all his prose material into the form of essays. He is one of the best critics in English literature. He is a critic of literature and a critic of society. As a critic he advocated a high moral purpose for all forms of art, and insisted rather too dogmatically, on very balanced and clear-cut expression. His own style in prose, however, lacks precision, and is marred occasionally by unseemly repetitions. But his vocabulary is always select and often he attains to a felicity of phrase not easily surpassed.

Among other essayists of the Victorian age, mention may be made of Henry Newman (1801-90), John Ruskin (1819-1900) and Walter Pater (1839-94). Newman was the master of a supple prose and at times, of a highly wrought style. Ruskin’s style is rich, ornate and full of gorgeous imagery. Pater wrote in a prose of rare beauty. His Appreciations remains his best work and is the best exponent of his aesthetic theories. But these writers write in a very ponderous and heavy style which is marked by elaboration and finish. They also lack the personal touch and conversational tone of Lamb. Hence their work is nearer to the treatise than to the essay. It is for this reason that critics like Orlo Williams deny them the title of the essayists.

R. L. Stevenson

R. L. Stevenson recaptured the charm of the personal type of essay. He was a born essayist. As Hugh Walker says: “Nature made him an essayist, and he cooperated with nature, developing, and strengthening the gifts with which he was endowed at birth”. He has often been compared with Lamb for his sweetness of temper and his personal charm, constantly exercised by taking the reader into his confidence. He is always moral without being didactic. He could write a beautiful essay on almost any topic. He set out to cultivate a clear and forcible style. He studied English sounds systematically and diligently, and used them with harmony.

The Essay in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century proved to be a fertile ground for the development of the Essay. It yielded a rich and varied harvest. The innumerable daily papers and weekly and monthly periodicals, provide an unlimited scope for the essayist. In the modern age both personal and objective essays have been written by various authors.

G. K. Chesterton

G K Chesterton deserves a high reputation as an essayist and critic of literature and society. Among his volumes of essays are Tremendous Trifles , A Shilling for My Thoughts , All Things Considered etc. His style is remarkable for its ingenuity, a curious sort of humour and its paradoxes and epigrams.

E. V. Lucas

E.V. Lucas is also a writer of the personal essay. He revived the tradition of Lamb, and is also his editor and biographer “ Less wistful and touching than Lamb” , Lucas has something of his master’s gusto and enthusiasm, even though the objects that inspire his feelings are necessarily different”. Lucas has a much wider experience of life than Lamb. He has an inexhaustible store of new subjects because he has an observant, sympathetic eye that makes all life its peculiar province Lucas is a regular contributor to the Punch: his humour is as quick and graceful as his perfect style. Like Lamb, Lucas is also attracted by the picturesqueness and gorgeousness of the city life of London. His major essay includes The Town week .

A. G. Gardiner

A. G. Gardiner is perhaps the most delightful of the modern essayists. He wrote under the pen name of ‘Alpha of the Plough’. His famous essays are collected in the volumes Pebbles on the Shore , Leaves in the Wind and Many Furrows . He has a rare understanding of men and affairs and wields a fluent and persuasive style enlivened by the touches of quiet humour. His essays are full of amusing anecdotes and homely illustrations drawn from everyday experience and they read like short stories.

Robert Lynd

In his style and outlook Robert Lynd cultivates the manner of R. L. Stevenson. His essays display his Stevensonian humour, reflectiveness and sympathy. Like E.V. Lucas, he builds his essays out of mere trifles and makes them the occasion of trenchant criticism of life. He has the confidential manner of the personal essayist. His style is simple and less elaborate, and therefore devoid of the mannerisms of R.L. Stevenson.

Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc occupies a very high place among the modern essayists by virtue of the volumes of his essays like On Nothing , On Something and On Everything . He has a clear incisive style in which humour, never really removed from satire, plays an important part.

Other Essayists

There are many other essayists of the twentieth century who follow the tradition of the personal essay. A few of them are – Max Beerbohm, Alice Meynell, Maurice Baring, Philip Guedella, George Bernard Shaw (Freedom) and Aldous Huxley.

Thus we see that the Essay, unknown by name up to the sixteenth century in England, has been developed brilliantly and on various lines by the writers of the succeeding generations. Let us hope and look for a brighter future for this genre of literary composition.

Hello, Viewers! Besides being the Founder and Owner of this website, I am a Government Officer. As a hardcore literary lover, I am pursuing my dream by writing notes and articles related to Literature. Drop me a line anytime, whether it’s about any queries or demands or just to share your well-being. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by!

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The brief history of artificial intelligence: the world has changed fast — what might be next?

Despite their brief history, computers and ai have fundamentally changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. little is as important for the world’s future and our own lives as how this history continues..

To see what the future might look like, it is often helpful to study our history. This is what I will do in this article. I retrace the brief history of computers and artificial intelligence to see what we can expect for the future.

How did we get here?

How rapidly the world has changed becomes clear by how even quite recent computer technology feels ancient today. Mobile phones in the ‘90s were big bricks with tiny green displays. Two decades before that, the main storage for computers was punch cards.

In a short period, computers evolved so quickly and became such an integral part of our daily lives that it is easy to forget how recent this technology is. The first digital computers were only invented about eight decades ago, as the timeline shows.

Since the early days of this history, some computer scientists have strived to make machines as intelligent as humans. The next timeline shows some of the notable artificial intelligence (AI) systems and describes what they were capable of.

The first system I mention is the Theseus. It was built by Claude Shannon in 1950 and was a remote-controlled mouse that was able to find its way out of a labyrinth and could remember its course. 1 In seven decades, the abilities of artificial intelligence have come a long way.

The language and image recognition capabilities of AI systems have developed very rapidly

The chart shows how we got here by zooming into the last two decades of AI development. The plotted data stems from a number of tests in which human and AI performance were evaluated in different domains, from handwriting recognition to language understanding.

Within each of the domains, the initial performance of the AI system is set to –100, and human performance in these tests is used as a baseline set to zero. This means that when the model’s performance crosses the zero line is when the AI system scored more points in the relevant test than the humans who did the same test. 2

Just 10 years ago, no machine could reliably provide language or image recognition at a human level. But, as the chart shows, AI systems have become steadily more capable and are now beating humans in tests in all these domains. 3

Outside of these standardized tests, the performance of these AIs is mixed. In some real-world cases, these systems are still performing much worse than humans. On the other hand, some implementations of such AI systems are already so cheap that they are available on the phone in your pocket: image recognition categorizes your photos and speech recognition transcribes what you dictate.

From image recognition to image generation

The previous chart showed the rapid advances in the perceptive abilities of artificial intelligence. AI systems have also become much more capable of generating images.

This series of nine images shows the development over the last nine years. None of the people in these images exist; all were generated by an AI system.

The series begins with an image from 2014 in the top left, a primitive image of a pixelated face in black and white. As the first image in the second row shows, just three years later, AI systems were already able to generate images that were hard to differentiate from a photograph.

In recent years, the capability of AI systems has become much more impressive still. While the early systems focused on generating images of faces, these newer models broadened their capabilities to text-to-image generation based on almost any prompt. The image in the bottom right shows that even the most challenging prompts — such as “A Pomeranian is sitting on the King’s throne wearing a crown. Two tiger soldiers are standing next to the throne” — are turned into photorealistic images within seconds. 5

Timeline of images generated by artificial intelligence 4

Language recognition and production is developing fast

Just as striking as the advances of image-generating AIs is the rapid development of systems that parse and respond to human language.

The image shows examples of an AI system developed by Google called PaLM. In these six examples, the system was asked to explain six different jokes. I find the explanation in the bottom right particularly remarkable: the AI explains an anti-joke specifically meant to confuse the listener.

AIs that produce language have entered our world in many ways over the last few years. Emails get auto-completed, massive amounts of online texts get translated, videos get automatically transcribed, school children use language models to do their homework, reports get auto-generated, and media outlets publish AI-generated journalism.

AI systems are not yet able to produce long, coherent texts. In the future, we will see whether the recent developments will slow down — or even end — or whether we will one day read a bestselling novel written by an AI.

Output of the AI system PaLM after being asked to interpret six different jokes 6

Where we are now: AI is here

These rapid advances in AI capabilities have made it possible to use machines in a wide range of new domains:

When you book a flight, it is often an artificial intelligence, no longer a human, that decides what you pay. When you get to the airport, it is an AI system that monitors what you do at the airport. And once you are on the plane, an AI system assists the pilot in flying you to your destination.

AI systems also increasingly determine whether you get a loan , are eligible for welfare, or get hired for a particular job. Increasingly, they help determine who is released from jail .

Several governments have purchased autonomous weapons systems for warfare, and some use AI systems for surveillance and oppression .

AI systems help to program the software you use and translate the texts you read. Virtual assistants , operated by speech recognition, have entered many households over the last decade. Now self-driving cars are becoming a reality.

In the last few years, AI systems have helped to make progress on some of the hardest problems in science.

Large AIs called recommender systems determine what you see on social media, which products are shown to you in online shops, and what gets recommended to you on YouTube. Increasingly they are not just recommending the media we consume, but based on their capacity to generate images and texts, they are also creating the media we consume.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future; AI is here, and much of what is reality now would have looked like sci-fi just recently. It is a technology that already impacts all of us, and the list above includes just a few of its many applications .

The wide range of listed applications makes clear that this is a very general technology that can be used by people for some extremely good goals — and some extraordinarily bad ones, too. For such “dual-use technologies”, it is important that all of us develop an understanding of what is happening and how we want the technology to be used.

Just two decades ago, the world was very different. What might AI technology be capable of in the future?

What is next?

The AI systems that we just considered are the result of decades of steady advances in AI technology.

The big chart below brings this history over the last eight decades into perspective. It is based on the dataset produced by Jaime Sevilla and colleagues. 7

The rise of artificial intelligence over the last 8 decades: As training computation has increased, AI systems have become more powerful 8

Each small circle in this chart represents one AI system. The circle’s position on the horizontal axis indicates when the AI system was built, and its position on the vertical axis shows the amount of computation used to train the particular AI system.

Training computation is measured in floating point operations , or FLOP for short. One FLOP is equivalent to one addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division of two decimal numbers.

All AI systems that rely on machine learning need to be trained, and in these systems, training computation is one of the three fundamental factors that are driving the capabilities of the system. The other two factors are the algorithms and the input data used for the training. The visualization shows that as training computation has increased, AI systems have become more and more powerful.

The timeline goes back to the 1940s when electronic computers were first invented. The first shown AI system is ‘Theseus’, Claude Shannon’s robotic mouse from 1950 that I mentioned at the beginning. Towards the other end of the timeline, you find AI systems like DALL-E and PaLM; we just discussed their abilities to produce photorealistic images and interpret and generate language. They are among the AI systems that used the largest amount of training computation to date.

The training computation is plotted on a logarithmic scale so that from each grid line to the next, it shows a 100-fold increase. This long-run perspective shows a continuous increase. For the first six decades, training computation increased in line with Moore’s Law , doubling roughly every 20 months. Since about 2010, this exponential growth has sped up further, to a doubling time of just about 6 months. That is an astonishingly fast rate of growth. 9

The fast doubling times have accrued to large increases. PaLM’s training computation was 2.5 billion petaFLOP, more than 5 million times larger than AlexNet, the AI with the largest training computation just 10 years earlier. 10

Scale-up was already exponential and has sped up substantially over the past decade. What can we learn from this historical development for the future of AI?

Studying the long-run trends to predict the future of AI

AI researchers study these long-term trends to see what is possible in the future. 11

Perhaps the most widely discussed study of this kind was published by AI researcher Ajeya Cotra. She studied the increase in training computation to ask at what point the computation to train an AI system could match that of the human brain. The idea is that, at this point, the AI system would match the capabilities of a human brain. In her latest update, Cotra estimated a 50% probability that such “transformative AI” will be developed by the year 2040, less than two decades from now. 12

In a related article , I discuss what transformative AI would mean for the world. In short, the idea is that such an AI system would be powerful enough to bring the world into a ‘qualitatively different future’. It could lead to a change at the scale of the two earlier major transformations in human history, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It would certainly represent the most important global change in our lifetimes.

Cotra’s work is particularly relevant in this context as she based her forecast on the kind of historical long-run trend of training computation that we just studied. But it is worth noting that other forecasters who rely on different considerations arrive at broadly similar conclusions. As I show in my article on AI timelines , many AI experts believe that there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, and some believe that it will exist much sooner.

Building a public resource to enable the necessary public conversation

Computers and artificial intelligence have changed our world immensely, but we are still in the early stages of this history. Because this technology feels so familiar, it is easy to forget that all of these technologies we interact with are very recent innovations and that the most profound changes are yet to come.

Artificial intelligence has already changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. This is despite the fact that this technology has had only a brief history.

There are no signs that these trends are hitting any limits anytime soon. On the contrary, particularly over the course of the last decade, the fundamental trends have accelerated: investments in AI technology have rapidly increased , and the doubling time of training computation has shortened to just six months.

All major technological innovations lead to a range of positive and negative consequences. This is already true of artificial intelligence. As this technology becomes more and more powerful, we should expect its impact to still increase.

Because of the importance of AI, we should all be able to form an opinion on where this technology is heading and understand how this development is changing our world. For this purpose, we are building a repository of AI-related metrics, which you can find on OurWorldinData.org/artificial-intelligence .

We are still in the early stages of this history, and much of what will become possible is yet to come. A technological development as powerful as this should be at the center of our attention. Little might be as important for how the future of our world — and the future of our lives — will play out.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank my colleagues Natasha Ahuja, Daniel Bachler, Julia Broden, Charlie Giattino, Bastian Herre, Edouard Mathieu, and Ike Saunders for their helpful comments to drafts of this essay and their contributions in preparing the visualizations.

On the Theseus see Daniel Klein (2019) — Mighty mouse , Published in MIT Technology Review. And this video on YouTube of a presentation by its inventor Claude Shannon.

The chart shows that the speed at which these AI technologies developed increased over time. Systems for which development was started early — handwriting and speech recognition — took more than a decade to approach human-level performance, while more recent AI developments led to systems that overtook humans in only a few years. However, one should not overstate this point. To some extent, this is dependent on when the researchers started to compare machine and human performance. One could have started evaluating the system for language understanding much earlier, and its development would appear much slower in this presentation of the data.

It is important to remember that while these are remarkable achievements — and show very rapid gains — these are the results from specific benchmarking tests. Outside of tests, AI models can fail in surprising ways and do not reliably achieve performance that is comparable with human capabilities.

The relevant publications are the following:

2014: Goodfellow et al.: Generative Adversarial Networks

2015: Radford, Metz, and Chintala: Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks

2016: Liu and Tuzel: Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks

2017: Karras et al.: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation

2018: Karras, Laine, and Aila: A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks (StyleGAN from NVIDIA)

2019: Karras et al.: Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN

AI-generated faces generated by this technology can be found on thispersondoesnotexist.com .

2020: Ho, Jain, and Abbeel: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

2021: Ramesh et al: Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation (first DALL-E from OpenAI; blog post ). See also Ramesh et al. (2022) — Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents (DALL-E 2 from OpenAI; blog post ).

2022: Saharia et al: Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding (Google’s Imagen; blog post )

Because these systems have become so powerful, the latest AI systems often don’t allow the user to generate images of human faces to prevent abuse.

From Chowdhery et al. (2022) —  PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways . Published on arXiv on 7 Apr 2022.

See the footnote on the chart's title for the references and additional information.

The data is taken from Jaime Sevilla, Lennart Heim, Anson Ho, Tamay Besiroglu, Marius Hobbhahn, Pablo Villalobos (2022) — Compute Trends Across Three eras of Machine Learning . Published in arXiv on March 9, 2022. See also their post on the Alignment Forum .

The authors regularly update and extend their dataset, a helpful service to the AI research community. At Our World in Data, my colleague Charlie Giattino regularly updates the interactive version of this chart with the latest data made available by Sevilla and coauthors.

See also these two related charts:

Number of parameters in notable artificial intelligence systems

Number of datapoints used to train notable artificial intelligence systems

At some point in the future, training computation is expected to slow down to the exponential growth rate of Moore's Law. Tamay Besiroglu, Lennart Heim, and Jaime Sevilla of the Epoch team estimate in their report that the highest probability for this reversion occurring is in the early 2030s.

The training computation of PaLM, developed in 2022, was 2,700,000,000 petaFLOP. The training computation of AlexNet, the AI with the largest training computation up to 2012, was 470 petaFLOP. 2,500,000,000 petaFLOP / 470 petaFLOP = 5,319,148.9. At the same time, the amount of training computation required to achieve a given performance has been falling exponentially.

The costs have also increased quickly. The cost to train PaLM is estimated to be $9–$23 million, according to Lennart Heim, a researcher in the Epoch team. See Lennart Heim (2022) — Estimating PaLM's training cost .

Scaling up the size of neural networks — in terms of the number of parameters and the amount of training data and computation — has led to surprising increases in the capabilities of AI systems. This realization motivated the “scaling hypothesis.” See Gwern Branwen (2020) — The Scaling Hypothesis ⁠.

Her research was announced in various places, including in the AI Alignment Forum here: Ajeya Cotra (2020) —  Draft report on AI timelines . As far as I know, the report always remained a “draft report” and was published here on Google Docs .

The cited estimate stems from Cotra’s Two-year update on my personal AI timelines , in which she shortened her median timeline by 10 years.

Cotra emphasizes that there are substantial uncertainties around her estimates and therefore communicates her findings in a range of scenarios. She published her big study in 2020, and her median estimate at the time was that around the year 2050, there will be a 50%-probability that the computation required to train such a model may become affordable. In her “most conservative plausible”-scenario, this point in time is pushed back to around 2090, and in her “most aggressive plausible”-scenario, this point is reached in 2040.

The same is true for most other forecasters: all emphasize the large uncertainty associated with their forecasts .

It is worth emphasizing that the computation of the human brain is highly uncertain. See Joseph Carlsmith's New Report on How Much Computational Power It Takes to Match the Human Brain from 2020.

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Essay on Earth

500 words essay on earth.

The earth is the planet that we live on and it is the fifth-largest planet. It is positioned in third place from the Sun. This essay on earth will help you learn all about it in detail. Our earth is the only planet that can sustain humans and other living species. The vital substances such as air, water, and land make it possible.

All About Essay on Earth

The rocks make up the earth that has been around for billions of years. Similarly, water also makes up the earth. In fact, water covers 70% of the surface. It includes the oceans that you see, the rivers, the sea and more.

Thus, the remaining 30% is covered with land. The earth moves around the sun in an orbit and takes around 364 days plus 6 hours to complete one round around it. Thus, we refer to it as a year.

Just like revolution, the earth also rotates on its axis within 24 hours that we refer to as a solar day. When rotation is happening, some of the places on the planet face the sun while the others hide from it.

As a result, we get day and night. There are three layers on the earth which we know as the core, mantle and crust. The core is the centre of the earth that is usually very hot. Further, we have the crust that is the outer layer. Finally, between the core and crust, we have the mantle i.e. the middle part.

The layer that we live on is the outer one with the rocks. Earth is home to not just humans but millions of other plants and species. The water and air on the earth make it possible for life to sustain. As the earth is the only livable planet, we must protect it at all costs.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

There is No Planet B

The human impact on the planet earth is very dangerous. Through this essay on earth, we wish to make people aware of protecting the earth. There is no balance with nature as human activities are hampering the earth.

Needless to say, we are responsible for the climate crisis that is happening right now. Climate change is getting worse and we need to start getting serious about it. It has a direct impact on our food, air, education, water, and more.

The rising temperature and natural disasters are clear warning signs. Therefore, we need to come together to save the earth and leave a better planet for our future generations.

Being ignorant is not an option anymore. We must spread awareness about the crisis and take preventive measures to protect the earth. We must all plant more trees and avoid using non-biodegradable products.

Further, it is vital to choose sustainable options and use reusable alternatives. We must save the earth to save our future. There is no Planet B and we must start acting like it accordingly.

Conclusion of Essay on Earth

All in all, we must work together to plant more trees and avoid using plastic. It is also important to limit the use of non-renewable resources to give our future generations a better planet.

FAQ on Essay on Earth

Question 1: What is the earth for kids?

Answer 1: Earth is the third farthest planet from the sun. It is bright and bluish in appearance when we see it from outer space. Water covers 70% of the earth while land covers 30%. Moreover, the earth is the only planet that can sustain life.

Question 2: How can we protect the earth?

Answer 2: We can protect the earth by limiting the use of non-renewable resources. Further, we must not waste water and avoid using plastic.

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May 21, 2013

12 min read

Origin of the Universe

Cosmologists are closing in on the ultimate processes that created and shaped the universe

By Michael S. Turner

The universe is big in both space and time and, for much of humankind's history, was beyond the reach of our instruments and our minds. That changed dramatically in the 20th century. The advances were driven equally by powerful ideas—from Einstein's general relativity to modern theories of the elementary particles—and powerful instruments—from the 100- and 200-inch reflectors that George Ellery Hale built, which took us beyond our Milky Way galaxy, to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has taken us back to the birth of galaxies. Over the past 30 years the pace of progress has accelerated with the realization that dark matter is not made of ordinary atoms, the discovery of dark energy, and the dawning of bold ideas such as cosmic inflation and the multiverse.

The universe of 100 years ago was simple: eternal, unchanging, consisting of a single galaxy, containing a few million visible stars. The picture today is more complete and much richer. The cosmos began 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang. A fraction of a second after the beginning, the universe was a hot, formless soup of the most elementary particles, quarks and leptons. As it expanded and cooled, layer on layer of structure developed: neutrons and protons, atomic nuclei, atoms, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and finally superclusters. The observable part of the universe is now inhabited by 100 billion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars and probably a similar number of planets. Galaxies themselves are held together by the gravity of the mysterious dark matter. The universe continues to expand and indeed does so at an accelerating pace, driven by dark energy, an even more mysterious form of energy whose gravitational force repels rather than attracts.

The overarching theme in our universe's story is the evolution from the simplicity of the quark soup to the complexity we see today in galaxies, stars, planets and life. These features emerged one by one over billions of years, guided by the basic laws of physics. In our journey back to the beginning of creation, cosmologists first travel through the well-established history of the universe back to the first microsecond; then to within 10

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−34 second of the beginning, for which ideas are well formed but the evidence is not yet firm; and finally to the earliest moments of creation, for which our ideas are still just speculation. Although the ultimate origin of the universe still lies beyond our grasp, we have tantalizing conjectures, including the notion of the multiverse, whereby the universe comprises an infinite number of disconnected subuniverses.

Expanding Universe

Using the 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson in 1924, Edwin Hubble showed that fuzzy nebulae, studied and speculated about for several hundred years, were galaxies just like our own—thereby enlarging the known universe by 100 billion. A few years later he showed that galaxies are moving apart from one another in a regular pattern described by a mathematical relation now known as Hubble's law, according to which galaxies that are farther away are moving faster. It is Hubble's law, played back in time, that points to a big bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Hubble's law found ready interpretation within general relativity: space itself is expanding, and galaxies are being carried along for the ride [ see box on opposite page ]. Light, too, is being stretched, or redshifted—a process that saps its energy, so that the universe cools as it expands. Cosmic expansion provides the narrative for understanding how today's universe came to be. As cosmologists imagine rewinding the clock, the universe becomes denser, hotter, more extreme and simpler. In exploring the beginning, we also probe the inner workings of nature by taking advantage of an accelerator more powerful than any built on Earth—the big bang itself.

By looking out into space with telescopes, astronomers peer back in time—and the larger the telescope, the farther back they peer. The light from distant galaxies reveals an earlier epoch, and the amount this light has redshifted indicates how much the universe has grown in the intervening years. The current record holder has a redshift of more than 10, representing a time when the universe was less than one-eleventh its present size and only a few hundred million years old. Telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the 10-meter Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea routinely take us back to the epoch when galaxies like ours were forming, a few billion years after the big bang. Light from even earlier times is so strongly redshifted that astronomers must look for it in the infrared and radio bands. Telescopes such as the planned James Webb Space Telescope, a 6.5-meter infrared telescope, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a network of 66 radio dishes already operating in northern Chile, can take us back to the birth of the very first stars and galaxies.

Computer simulations say that those stars and galaxies emerged when the universe was about 100 million years old. Before then, the universe went through a time called the “dark ages,” when it was almost pitch-black. Space was filled with a featureless gruel, five parts dark matter and one part hydrogen and helium, that thinned out as the universe expanded. Matter was slightly uneven in density, and gravity acted to amplify these density variations: denser regions expanded more slowly than less dense ones did. By 100 million years the densest regions did not merely expand more slowly but actually started to collapse. Such regions contained about one million solar masses of material each. They were the first gravitationally bound objects in the cosmos.

Dark matter accounted for the bulk of their mass but was, as its name suggests, unable to emit or absorb light. So it remained in an extended cloud. Hydrogen and helium gas, on the other hand, emitted light, lost energy and became concentrated in the center of the cloud. Eventually it collapsed all the way down to stars. These first stars were much more massive than today's—hundreds of solar masses. They lived very short lives before exploding and leaving behind the first heavy elements. Over the next billion years or so the force of gravity assembled these million-solar-mass clouds into the first galaxies.

Radiation emitted from primordial hydrogen clouds, which were greatly redshifted by the expansion, should be detectable by giant arrays of radio antennas with a total collecting area of up to one square kilometer. When built, these arrays will watch as the first generation of stars and galaxies ionize the hydrogen and bring the dark ages to an end.

Faint Glow of a Hot Beginning

Beyond the dark ages is the glow of the hot big bang at a redshift of 1,100. This radiation has been redshifted from visible light (a red-orange glow) beyond even the infrared to microwaves. What we see from that time is a wall of microwave radiation filling the sky—the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. It provides a glimpse of the universe at the tender age of 380,000 years, the period when atoms formed. Before then, the universe was a nearly uniform soup of atomic nuclei, electrons and photons. As it cooled to a temperature of about 3,000 kelvins, the nuclei and electrons came together to form atoms. Photons ceased to scatter off electrons and streamed across space unhindered, revealing the universe at a simpler time before the existence of stars and galaxies.

In 1992 NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite discovered that the intensity of the CMB has slight variations—about 0.001 percent—reflecting a slight lumpiness in the distribution of matter. The degree of primordial lumpiness was enough to act as seeds for the galaxies and larger structures that would later emerge from the action of gravity. The pattern of these variations in the CMB across the sky also encodes basic properties of the universe, such as its overall density and composition, as well as hints about its earliest moments; the careful study of these variations has revealed much about the universe [ see illustration on page 41 ].

As we roll a movie of the universe's evolution back from that point, we see the primordial plasma becoming ever hotter and denser. Prior to about 100,000 years, the energy density of radiation exceeded that of matter, which kept matter from clumping. Therefore, this time marks the beginning of gravitational assembly of all the structure seen in the universe today. Still further back, when the universe was less than a second old, atomic nuclei had yet to form; only their constituent particles—namely, protons and neutrons—existed. Nuclei emerged when the universe was seconds old and the temperatures and densities were just right for nuclear reactions. This process of big bang nucleosynthesis produced only the lightest elements in the periodic table: a lot of helium (about 25 percent of the atoms in the universe by mass) and smaller amounts of lithium and the isotopes deuterium and helium 3. The rest of the plasma (about 75 percent) stayed in the form of protons that would eventually become hydrogen atoms. All the rest of the elements in the periodic table formed billions of years later in stars and stellar explosions.

Nucleosynthesis theory accurately predicts the abundances of elements and isotopes measured in the most primeval samples of the universe—namely, the oldest stars and high-redshift gas clouds. The abundance of deuterium, which is very sensitive to the density of atoms in the universe, plays a special role: its measured value implies that ordinary matter amounts to 4.5 ± 0.1 percent of the total energy density. (The remainder is dark matter and dark energy.) This estimate agrees precisely with the composition that has been gleaned from the analysis of the CMB. This correspondence is a great triumph. That these two very different measures, one based on nuclear physics when the universe was a second old and the other based on atomic physics when the universe was 380,000 years old, agree is a strong check not just on our model of how the cosmos evolved but on all of modern physics.

Answers in the Quark Soup

Earlier than a microsecond, even protons and neutrons could not exist and the universe was a soup of nature's basic building blocks: quarks, leptons, and the force carriers (photons, the W and Z bosons, and gluons). We can be confident that the quark soup existed because experiments at particle accelerators have re-created similar conditions here on Earth today.

To explore this epoch, cosmologists rely not on bigger and better telescopes but also on powerful ideas from particle physics. The development of the Standard Model of particle physics 30 years ago has led to bold speculations, including string theory, about how the seemingly disparate fundamental particles and forces are unified. As it turns out, these new ideas have implications for cosmology that are as important as the original idea of the hot big bang. They hint at deep and unexpected connections between the world of the very big and of the very small. Answers to three key questions—the nature of dark matter, the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, and the origin of the lumpy quark soup itself—have been starting to emerge.

It now appears that the early quark soup phase was the birthplace of dark matter. The identity of dark matter remains unclear, but its existence is very well established. Our galaxy and every other galaxy, as well as clusters of galaxies, are held together by the gravity of unseen dark matter. Whatever the dark matter is, it must interact weakly with ordinary matter; otherwise it would have shown itself in other ways. Attempts to find a unifying framework for the forces and particles of nature have led to the prediction of stable or long-lived particles that might constitute dark matter. Some of these hypothetical particles would be present today as remnants of the quark soup phase in the correct numbers to be the dark matter and could even be detected.

One candidate is the called the neutralino, the lightest of a putative new class of particles that are heavier counterparts of the known particles. The neutralino is thought to have a mass between 100 and 1,000 times that of the proton, just within the reach of experiments now under way at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva. Physicists have also built ultrasensitive underground detectors, as well as satellite and balloon-borne varieties, to look for this particle or the by-products of its interactions.

A second candidate is the axion, a superlightweight particle about one-trillionth the mass of the electron. Its existence is hinted at by subtleties that the Standard Model predicts in the behavior of quarks. Efforts to detect it exploit the fact that in a very strong magnetic field, an axion can transform into a photon. Both neutralinos and axions have the important property that they are, in a specific technical sense, “cold.” Although they formed under broiling hot conditions, they were slow-moving and thus easily clumped into galaxies.

The early quark soup phase probably also holds the secret to why the universe today contains mostly matter rather than both matter and antimatter. Physicists think the universe originally had equal amounts of each, but at some point it developed a slight excess of matter—about one extra quark for every billion antiquarks. This imbalance ensured that enough quarks would survive annihilation with antiquarks as the universe expanded and cooled. More than 40 years ago accelerator experiments revealed that the laws of physics are ever so slightly biased in favor of matter, and in a still to be understood series of particle interactions very early on, this slight bias led to the creation of the quark excess.

The quark soup itself is thought to have arisen at an extremely early time—perhaps 10

−34 second after the big bang in a burst of cosmic expansion known as inflation. This burst, driven by the energy of a new field (thought to be distantly related to the recently discovered Higgs field) called the inflaton, would explain such basic properties of the cosmos as its general uniformity and the lumpiness that seeded galaxies and other structures in the universe. As the inflaton field decayed away, it released its remaining energy into quarks and other particles, thereby creating the heat of the big bang and the quark soup itself.

Inflation leads to a profound connection between the quarks and the cosmos: quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field on the subatomic scale get blown up to astrophysical size by the rapid expansion and become the seeds for all the structure we see today. In other words, the pattern seen on the CMB sky is a giant image of the subatomic world. Observations of the CMB agree with this prediction, providing the strongest evidence that inflation or something like it occurred very early in the history of the universe.

Birth of the Universe

As cosmologists try to go even further to understand the beginning of the universe itself, our ideas become less firm. Einstein's general theory of relativity has provided the theoretical foundation for a century of progress in our understanding of the evolution of the universe. Because the general theory of relativity does not incorporate quantum theory, the other pillar of contemporary physics, it cannot be relied upon to address the very earliest moments of creation when quantum gravity effects should have been important. The discipline's greatest challenge is to develop a quantum theory of gravity, with which we will be able to address the so-called Planck era prior to about 10

−43 second, when spacetime itself was taking shape.

Tentative attempts at a unified theory have led to some remarkable speculations about our very beginnings. String theory, for example, predicts the existence of additional dimensions of space and possibly other universes floating in that larger space. What we call the big bang may have been the collision of our universe with another. The marriage of string theory with the concept of inflation has led to perhaps the boldest idea yet, that of a multiverse—namely, that the universe comprises an infinite number of disconnected pieces, each with its own local laws of physics.

The multiverse concept, which is still in its infancy, turns on two key theoretical findings. First, the equations describing inflation strongly suggest that if inflation happened once, it should happen again and again, with an infinite number of inflationary regions created over time. Nothing can travel between these regions, so they have no effect on one another. Second, string theory suggests that these regions have different physical parameters, such as the number of spatial dimensions and the kinds of stable particles.

The idea of the multiverse provides novel answers to two of the biggest questions in all of science: what happened before the big bang and why the laws of physics are as they are (Albert Einstein's famous musing about “whether God had any choice” about the laws). The multiverse makes moot the question of what happened before the big bang because there were an infinite number of big bang beginnings, each triggered by its own burst of inflation. Likewise, Einstein's question is pushed aside: within the infinity of universes, all possibilities for the laws of physics have been tried, so there is no particular reason for the laws that govern our universe.

Cosmologists have mixed feelings about the multiverse. If the disconnected subuniverses are truly incommunicado, we cannot hope to test their existence; they seem to lie beyond the realm of science. Part of me wants to scream, One universe at a time, please! On the other hand, the multiverse solves various conceptual problems. If correct, it will make Hubble's enlargement of the universe by a mere factor of 100 billion and Copernicus's banishment of Earth from the center of the universe in the 16th century seem like small advances in the understanding of our place in the cosmos.

Modern cosmology has humbled us. We are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which together account for only 4.5 percent of the universe, and we exist only because of subtle connections between the very small and the very large. Events guided by the microscopic laws of physics allowed matter to dominate over antimatter, generated the lumpiness that seeded galaxies, filled space with dark matter particles that provide the gravitational infrastructure, and ensured that dark matter could build galaxies before dark energy became significant and the expansion began to accelerate [ see box above ]. At the same time, cosmology by its very nature is arrogant. The idea that we can understand something as vast in both space and time as our universe is, on the face of it, preposterous. This strange mix of humility and arrogance has gotten us pretty far in the past century in advancing our understanding of the present universe and its origin. I am bullish on further progress in the coming years, and I firmly believe we are living in a golden age of cosmology.

• Tournaments

Football history

Welcome to FootballHistory.org, a website about football history including competitions, teams and players.

The history of football (soccer)

Football (or soccer as the game is called in some parts of the world) has a long history. Football in its current form arose in England in the middle of the 19th century. But alternative versions of the game existed much earlier and are a part of the football history.

Early history and the precursors of football

The first known examples of a team game involving a ball, which was made out of a rock, occurred in old Mesoamerican cultures for over 3,000 years ago. It was by the Aztecs called Tchatali , although various versions of the game were spread over large regions. In some ritual occasions, the ball would symbolize the sun and the captain of the losing team would be sacrificed to the gods. A unique feature of the Mesoamerican ball game versions was a bouncing ball made of rubber – no other early culture had access to rubber. The first known ball game which also involved kicking took place In China in the 3rd and 2nd century BC under the name cuju . Cuju was played with a round ball (stitched leather with fur or feathers inside) on an area of a square. A modified form of this game later spread to Japan and was by the name of kemari practiced under ceremonial forms. Perhaps even older than cuju was Marn Gook , played by Aboriginal Australians and according to white emigrants in the 1800s, a ball game that primarily involving kicking. The ball was made by encased leaves or roots. The rules are mostly unknown, but as with many other early versions of the game, a chief feature seems to have been to keep the ball in the air. Other variety of ball games had been known from Ancient Greece. The ball was made by shreds of leather filled with hair (the first documents of balls filled with air are from the 7th century). Ball games had, however, a low status and was not included at the Panhellenic Games. In the Ancient Rome, games with balls were not included in the entertainment on the big arenas (amphitheaters), but occurred in exercises in the military by the name of Harpastum . It was the Roman culture that would bring football to the British island (Britannica). It is, however, uncertain in which degree the British people were influenced by this variety and in which degree they had developed their own variants.

The game of football takes its form

The most admitted story tells that the game was developed in England in the 12th century. In this century, games that resembled football were played on meadows and roads in England. Besides from kicks, the game involved also punches of the ball with the fist. This early form of football was also much more rough and violent than the modern way of playing. An important feature of the forerunners to football was that the games involved plenty of people and took place over large areas in towns (an equivalent was played in Florence from the 16th century where it was called Calcio ). The rampage of these games would cause damage on the town and sometimes death to the participants. These would be among the reasons for the proclamations against the game that finally was forbidden for several centuries. But the football-like games would return to the streets of London in the 17th century. It would be forbidden again in 1835, but at this stage the game had been established in the public schools.

It took, however, long time until the features of today’s football had been taken into practice. For a long time there was no clear distinction between football and rugby. There were also many variations concerning the size of the ball, the number of players and the length of a match.

The game was often played in schools and two of the predominant schools were Rugby and Eton. At Rugby the rules included the possibility to take up the ball with the hands and the game we today know as rugby has its origin from here. At Eton on the other hand the ball was played exclusively with the feet and this game can be seen as a close predecessor to the modern football. The game in Rugby was called “the running game” while the game in Eton was called “the dribbling game”.

An attempt to create proper rules for the game was done at a meeting in Cambridge in 1848, but a final solution to all questions of rules was not achieved. Another important event in the history of football came about in 1863 in London when the first Football association was formed in England. It was decided that carrying the ball with the hands wasn't allowed. The meeting also resulted in a standardization of the size and weight of the ball. A consequence of the London meeting was that the game was divided into two codes: association football and rugby. The game would, however, continue to develop for a long time and there was still much flexibility concerning the rules. For one thing, the number of players on the pitch could vary. Neither were uniforms used to distinguish the appearance of the teams. It was also common with players wearing caps – the header was yet to be a part of the game yet. Further reading: The development of football rules . Another important difference at this stage could be noticed between English and Scottish teams. Whereas the English teams preferred to run forward with the ball in a more rugby fashion, the Scottish chose to pass the ball between their players. It would be the Scottish approach that soon became predominant. The sport was at first an entertainment for the British working class. Unprecedented amounts of spectators, up to 30,000, would see the big matches in the late 19th century. The game would soon expand by British peoples who traveled to other parts of the world and as a result to the British colonization efforts. Especially in South America and India would the interest in football become big.

The first football clubs

Football clubs have existed since the 15th century, but unorganized and without official status. It is therefore hard to decide which the first football club was. Some historians suggest that it was the Foot-Ball Club formed 1824 in Edinburgh. Early clubs were often formed by former school students and the first of this kind was formed in Sheffield in 1855. The oldest among professional football clubs is the English club Notts County that was formed in 1862 and still exists today. An important step for the emergence of teams was the industrialization that led to larger groups of people meeting at places such as factories, pubs and churches. Football teams were established in the larger cities and the new railroads could bring them to other cities. In the beginning, football was dominated by public school teams, but later, teams consisting by workers would make up the majority. Another change was successively taking place when some clubs became willing to pay the best players to join their team. This would be the start of a long period of transition, not without friction, in which the game would develop to a professional level. The motivation behind paying players was not only to win more matches. In the 1880s the interest in the game has moved ahead to a level that tickets were sold to the matches. And finally, in 1885 professional football was legalized and three years later the Football League was established. During the first season, 12 clubs joined the league, but soon more clubs became interested and the competition would consequently expand into more divisions. For a long time, the British teams would be dominant. After some decades, clubs from Prague, Budapest and Sienna would be the primarily contenders to the British dominance. As with many things in history, women were for a long time excluded from participating in games. It was not before the late 19th century that women started to play football. The first official women's game took place in Inverness in 1888.

The first competitions

Twelve years later, in 1883, the first international tournament took place and included four national teams: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Football was for a long time a British phenomenon, but it gradually spread to other European countries. The first game that took place outside Europe occurred in Argentina in 1867, but it was foreign British workers who were involved and not Argentinean citizens.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in 1904 and a foundation act was signed by representatives from France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. England and the other British countries did not join FIFA from the start, they had invented the game and saw no reason to subordinate to an association. Still, they joined in the following year, but would not partake in the World Cup until 1950. Domestic leagues occurred in many countries. The first was, as already mentioned, the English Football League which was established in 1888. The leagues would by time expand by more divisions, which were based on team performance. In 1908 would football for the first time be included as an official sport in the Olympic Games. Until the first FIFA World Cup was played in 1930, the Olympic Games football tournament would rank as the most prestigious on a national level. Women's football was not added until 1996.

Black players

As in many other sports the white male was predominant for a long time. In football black players started being present relatively early and in comparison with, for example, tennis, football has traditionally been known as a sport with a mix of black and white players.

In Britain, Andrew Watson is known to be the first black player, and he played in the Scottish club Queen’s Park in the 1880s.

A game of passion

Already in the late 19th century, Goodison Park was built in England in purpose of hosting football games. In 1894, the FA Cup final between Notts County and Bolton Wanderers was attended by 37,000 people. A milestone in the development of football stadiums is the construction of Maracanã Stadium. In the year of 1950 the imposing stadium in Rio de Janeiro was ready for almost 200,000 people. No other sport has seen stadiums of that capacity built to host its games. There have been two different traditions of fan culture on the arenas: the British and the South American. The British fans adopted the tradition of singing, the repertoire was inspired from pub and working songs among other areas. The South Americans on the other hand would adopt the carnival style which included firecrackers and fireworks, and also the modern phenomena of Bengali fires. Fans in other countries have later adopted a mixture of these traditions.

The great modern competitions

No other sport event besides the Summer Olympic Games can today measure itself with the FIFA World Cup . The first edition of the FIFA World Cup was played in 1930 in Uruguay and has since then returned every fourth year (with two exceptions due to the Second World War). In 1991 the first World Cup for women was held in China and has since then also returned every fourth year. Today the biggest global tournament for clubs is the Champions League (played since 1992), the former European Cup (1955–1991).

Globalization of the biggest sport in the world

In the late 19th century, only a few national football teams existed; England and Scotland had the first active teams that played games against each other in the 1870s. Today there are 211 national associations included in the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the world governing body of the sport. Another proof of the globalization could be seen in the increase of nations participating in the World Cup qualifiers: from 32 in 1934 to over 200 in 2014. The world regions have been divided into six confederations: Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF), Asian Football Confederation (AFC), Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA), The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF), Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), and Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL). Football is definitely a global sport and without comparison the biggest in the world. A quote from David Goldblatt's book The Ball is Round present one answer:

It offers the spotlight for individual brilliance while relishing the defiance and heart of collective endeavor. It has staged tragedy and comedy, epic and pantomime, unsophisticated music hall and inaccessible experimental performances. It does imperious triumph, lucky escapes, impossible comebacks and stubborn stalemates. It captures the brilliance of unpredictability, the uncertainty of the human heart and human skill, of improvisation and chance.

The name of the game: football or soccer?

In most parts of the world, football is used as the name for the “chess of the green pitch”, the biggest sport in the world. In the United States and Canada, however, soccer is used instead as a distinction from American football. A more formal name sometimes used is association football, but in popular speech, it is either football or soccer.

More articles

› Formations and playing systems in football › The Evolution of Football Shoes › The football field and its dimensions › History of football stadiums › The name of football in various languages › Collection of links to other sites about football on the web

References: The National Encyclopedia History of Football: The Beautiful Game (2002 Documentary Series) The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football – David Goldblatt (2008) http://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/the-game/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_football_clubs http://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/history/ http://spartacus-educational.com/Fblack.htm http://spartacus-educational.com/Fstadiums.htm http://www.fifa.com/associations/ Image sources: Andrea Scoto – ItiIllustration da Francesco. Bertelli. Padua William Ralston (1848–1911) – Scanned from The Official History of The Football Association by Bryon Butler – Queen Ane Press Documentary film Alegria do Povo (1963)

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Origins of Religion Response Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Origins of religion, works cited.

In the book, the second chapter on the origin of religion is the important since it is speculative and fascinating, as the author suggests. The author notes in the introduction that a number of studies are simply concerned with explaining the reasons why people are religious, but they do not delve into the issue touching on the origin of religion. The focus of the chapter is to report on where religious ideas and practices came from.

Moreover, the chapter evaluates the idea of God or supernatural powers since such powers are sacred forces that influence the behaviour of individuals in a number of ways. The author is of the view that answers to the origin of religion are numerous, even though they can be grouped into a few categories.

To establish the real origin of religion, the use of scientific methods is inadequate hence the use of theories is the only valid method of tracing the origins of religion. Before proceeding to look at the theories that the author provides regarding the origin of religion, it is prudent to define sociology of religion.

Sociology of religion refers to the study of cultural beliefs, practices, and forms of organizations. Sociologists study religion through some of the established tools and methods. Sociological explanation of the origin of religion is very different from the views of other scholars from different fields.

Prehistoric people had no reason to trace the origin of religion since they were not concerned with understanding the dynamics of society. In the modern society, religion plays a critical role of uniting people.

This paper discusses various theories that explain the origin religion in the modern society. Religion in the modern society is very complex, unlike in the traditional society whereby it was considered an individual’s belief system.

Revelation is one of the theories that sociologists employ in trying to explain how people started worshiping the supernatural being. The author notes that people believed in God, who was the creator, in the early days of Christianity. In this regard, God was the originator of all religions in the world, including the traditional ones. The theory suggests that God created everything on earth, including people.

In the Garden of Eden God instituted some principles and laws that were supposed to govern the first man. Later on, God would pass his message through prophets, as he did in the Old Testament. Through this process, he was creating religion since he expected people to follow his commandments. A number of religions believe in this theory, including Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism.

Gautama Buddha claimed that he had a revelation, which inspired him to spread the Buddha teachings. Mormonism was inspired by a revelation that was in form of golden plates that were buried in a hill referred to as Cumorah in New York State (Johnstone 23).

One of the founders of religion, John Smith, claimed that God gave him the power to interpret and translate what was in the plates. In the Islamic religion, Muhammad claimed to have received visions from one of the angels referred to as Gabriel in a cave near Mecca.

Christian theologians who claim that they received direct revelation from God for the gift of true religion hold the natural knowledge of God theory (Johnstone 23). Those who believe in the Holy Bible give such explanations. In fact, the existence of other religions disturbs them so much.

In this regard, Christian theologians wonder how other religions came about since God revealed himself through the chosen people of Israel. The theory answers their question since it claims that people have a fundamental knowledge regarding the existence of God.

Johnstone is of the view that all human beings are born with an elementary knowledge of the heavenly, which is a basic awareness that God or some power is, in due course, responsible for what they witness around them (24). Other religion, other than Christianity, tries to be aware of their surrounding and make sense out of the little knowledge they have in relation to God.

Anthropologists have a different theory explaining the origins of religion. According to anthropological theories, religion emerged as a response to the experiences of various individuals, who tried to construe the world around them. Individuals in the traditional society came across awesome, mysterious, and terrifying events that forced them to reconsider their religious positions.

Some of these terrifying events include sickness, thunder and lightning, earthquakes, tidal waves, and floods (Johnstone 24). Many people sought to find the real causes of these horrifying events. Traditional religious systems were relied upon in explaining these events, which facilitated the growth of religion. People would then allocate causes for the so-called natural observable facts, as well as other recurrent incidents.

Within anthropological explanations, at least two schools of thoughts exist, one of them being naturalistic school headed by Max Muller. This school of thought insists that physical acts of nature, such as storms, sunrises, and tides, contributed to the development of religion (Muller 88).

In this regard, individuals in the prehistoric societies were fearful and defenceless since they existed at the mercy of these horrifying events. Some were worried why a tragic even would happen to them and not other people. Such individuals were of the believe that all natural disasters were either caused by human beings or other human-like agents since they witnessed people killing each other and pushing rocks.

Through this reasoning, this believe, believe in sprits was eminent since individuals thought that some agents must be hiding somewhere, with the power to natural disasters, such as death. Edward Tylor led a different school of thought that held an animistic view, which believed in personal experiences, such as dreams and reflections (Johnstone 25).

Psychologists have a different view as regards the origin of religion, which treats the origin of religion in terms of people’s emotional needs (Johnstone 25). As anthropologists focused on cognitive needs in explaining inexplicable events, psychologists are more focused on giving an emotional explanation.

In this regard, they note that people are always in need of maintaining an emotional stability whenever they experience danger, uncertainty, and interference. People ask themselves how they would get out of danger, particularly when faced with disruptions such as sickness, accident, and threats of death.

An individual would wonder why a disaster would happen to him or her or even to those he or she loves. At this stage, an individual tries to make sense out of the disaster by asking how he or she can find strength to move on. An individual would be aiming at finding some hope in the future. Brown was of the view that religion is a response to constant threats to security, safety, and future existence (12).

Sociologists offer a different explanation concerning the origins of religion. In fact, sociologists do not use the term origins, but instead they employ the word correlates in their analysis of religion to explain its origins. This means that religion is an ever-present aspect in the lives of individuals. Sociologists are focused on establishing the relationships between modern religion and other social forces.

According to modern sociologists, religion is everywhere meaning that tracing its origins would be an exercise in futility since it exists in a number of varieties. George Simmel was one of the sociologists who analyzed religion, as well as its interactions with other social variables. He was of the view that a number of no-religious aspects influence tremendous effect to various forms of religions in the modern society.

In this regard, a number of views and prototypes of expressions frequently referred to as spiritual are also found in other areas of life (Johnstone 30). These patterns are general ingredients of social interactions. They include adulation, loyalty, fervour and worship. Durkheim analyzed the role of religion in legitimizing social values and norms. Through setting standards, religion offers divine sanctions for human behaviour.

When people come together to perform rituals, their feeling of unity is strengthened. Durkheim went ahead to discuss two important concepts, which are totem and totemic principle. He observed that a totem is an object or something alive, including a bird, an animal and plants (Johnstone 31). The object is not so important to human life, but what matters is what the object worships.

Brown, Laurence. Advances in the Psychology of Religion . Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985. Print.

Johnstone, Ronald. Religion in Society: Sociology of Religion . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.

Muller, Max. Anthropological Religion . Whitefish: Kessinger Publication, 2005. Print.

• Sunday School in HD by Allan Taylor
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The Origin and Nature of the Church

Other essays.

The church is the new covenant people of God, rooted in the promises to Israel and inaugurated by the Holy Spirit, which refers both to all believers in Jesus Christ, both living and dead, and to local gatherings of believers.

The church is the new covenant people of God. The word church can be used to refer both to all believers, both living and dead (universal church), and to individual local gatherings of believers (local church). The church has its roots in the promises made to God’s people in the Old Testament, particularly that God would bless the world through Abraham’s offspring. While there is continuity between the Old Testament people of God and the church, the church is the community of Jesus, new at Pentecost. As such, the church is the fulfillment of God’s promise to the prophets that he would make a new and better covenant with his people and write his law on their hearts. The mission of the church is the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20): to go out into the world with the authority of the risen Christ and make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to follow Jesus until he returns, all to the glory of God.

The church has its origin in the eternal purposes of God. It is the new covenant community of Jesus, rooted in Israel, constructed by Jesus, and inaugurated by the Holy Spirit. The church is the people of God, chosen by the Father, and graciously brought into a relationship with the triune God and one another. The church is the redeemed communion of saints, bought by the blood of Christ, universal and invisible, incorporating all believers throughout all ages—those on earth and those in heaven. The church is the adopted family of God, once slaves to sin but now brought into a loving relationship with God as Father and each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. The church is the body of Christ, having him as head, dependent on him, gifted by the Holy Spirit, crafted as a unity with diversity, and reliant on one another, functioning as Christ’s instruments in the world. The church is the bride of Christ, particularly loved by him, saved by his sacrificial work on the cross, exclusively devoted to him, and increasingly adorned in beauty for him, the Bridegroom. The church is the temple of the Spirit, filled with the fullness of Christ, marked by God’s presence. The church is the new humanity, composed of Jewish and Gentile Christians united in Christ, and demonstrating the way life was always supposed to be. The church is the branches that abide in the true vine that is Christ, in union with him and dependent on him. The church is the gathered covenant community, regularly coming together for worship, communion, discipleship, fellowship, ministry, and mission. The church is the kingdom community, existing in the already and the not yet, living out God’s eternal purpose of cosmic unity, all for God’s glory (See Bruce Riley Ashford and Christopher W. Morgan, “The Church,” in ESV Systematic Theology Study Bible , 1713.)

The Origin of the Church

The people of God began with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. He created them in his image, which means that they are created in fellowship with their Maker (Gen 1:27). Even though they rebelled against him, he did not reject them but promised to send a Redeemer (3:16).

Later, God called Abraham from a family of sun-worshippers and enters into a covenant with him, promising to be his god, both to him and his descendants (Gen. 17:7). God promised to give Abraham a land, to make him into a great nation, and through him to bless all peoples (12:3). From Abraham is born Isaac and to Isaac is born Jacob, whose name God changed to Israel and from whom God brought the twelve tribes of his people. The rest of the Old Testament involves God’s dealings with these twelve tribes of Israel.

Through ten great plagues and a dramatic exodus, God called the nation of Israel out of Egyptian bondage to be his people. He gave them the Ten Commandments, claimed them as his people, and gave them the Promised Land, which they occupied after defeating the Canaanites. Later God gave them David as king in Jerusalem. God promised to make David’s descendants into a dynasty and to establish the throne of one of them forever (2 Sam. 7:14–16).

In mercy, God sent many prophets to warn his Old Testament people of the judgment that would come if they did not repent of their sins and turn to the Lord. Nevertheless, they repeatedly rebelled against him and his prophets. In response, he sent the northern kingdom of ten tribes into captivity in Assyria in 722 BC and the southern kingdom of two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, into captivity in Babylon in 586 BC. Through the prophets, God also promised to provide a Deliverer (Isa. 9:6–7; 52:13–53:12).

God promised to restore his people to their land from Babylonian captivity after seventy years of exile (Jer. 25:11–12), and he brings this about under Ezra and Nehemiah. The people rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and built a second temple. The Old Testament ends in the book of Malachi with God’s people continuing to turn away from him, but also with a promise of one who would come to prepare the way for Messiah (Mal. 3:1).

After four hundred years, God sent his Son as the promised Messiah, Suffering Servant, King of Israel, and Savior of the world. Jesus made the purpose of his coming clear: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). He formed his new community (Matt. 5–7). He chose disciples, spent time with them, taught them about the kingdom of God, casted out demons, performed miracles, and predicted his death and resurrection. After he was raised, he instructed his disciples to take the gospel to all nations to fulfill his promise to Abraham to bless all peoples (Matt. 28:18–20).

On the day of Pentecost, Jesus sent his Spirit, who forms the church as the New Testament people of God (Acts 2:1–13). The Spirit empowered the disciples to spread the gospel to the world (Acts 1:8) He also empowered the apostles and guided them into truth. Even more, the Spirit still now indwells the church, leads it, and gives every one of its people spiritual gifts to serve God and each other (Eph. 2:19–22; 4:1–16).

The church is often described in Old Testament terms (Gal. 6:16; Phil. 3:3; 1 Pet. 2:9–10), and there is both continuity and discontinuity between Old Testament Israel and the church. On the one hand, there is one single covenant people of God, with roots in the Abrahamic covenant and Israel. On the other hand, the church is the new covenant community of Jesus, new at Pentecost.

The Nature of the Church  

The church universal and local.

The word “church” ( ekklesia ) in the New Testament refers to the church in its many manifestations. The term can refer to churches meeting in homes (1 Cor. 16:19; Phlm. 1–2), to city-wide or metropolitan churches (Acts 8:1; 20:17), corporately with the churches in a specific Roman province (Acts 9:31; 1 Cor. 16:19), and on a few occasions to the whole ecumenical church (Acts 15:22). But the most common uses of the term can mean either the universal or local church.  

The Universal Church

Sometimes “church” is used to depict what some may call the universal church, which speaks of the unity of all believers everywhere, both living and dead (Eph. 1:22; 3:20–22; 5:27). The church in this sense is not identical with any one local church, denomination, or association. It is not entirely visible to human beings and refers to the total of all believers from all places and all times.

The Local Church

Most of the time in the NT the “church” refers to the local church, the gathered community of God’s people who are covenanted together to worship the triune God, love one another, and witness to the world (Acts 14:23; 16:5). This designation is the main usage of the term “church”; the Bible emphasizes the church as a local group of identifiable believers committed to Christ and each other, working together to glorify God and to serve his mission.

The local church is the primary center of fellowship and worship, and the chief means God uses for evangelism, disciple-making, and ministry. The local church is where the Word is taught and preached (2 Tim. 3:16–4:2). The local church is where the ordinances are practiced in baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Matt. 28:18–20; 1 Cor. 11:23–26). These truths are why Paul plants local churches, appoints leaders for them, sends delegates to them, and writes epistles to them. Local churches are significant in his theology, and they are crucial in his mission strategy. In the local church, there is a sharing of life together, growing in maturity together, ministering together, worshipping together, and witnessing together.

The Church as the People of God

Under the old covenant, Israel was a mixed community, comprised of believers and unbelievers. In the New Testament, the church is the people of God under the new covenant. While evangelicals differ on how to interpret covenant and define how children of believers relate to the church’s membership, there is wide agreement that the New Testament emphasizes the church is the people of God. Jeremiah predicts the superiority of the new covenant to the old. Because of their sins and unbelief, the Israelites whom God delivered from Egypt broke the old Mosaic covenant and died in the wilderness. The new covenant will be much greater because it will center on God’s work. The Lord promises that he will be his people’s God, and they will belong to him. He will write his law on their hearts, they will know him, and they will obey him (Jer. 31:31–34). Jesus teaches that his death ratifies the new covenant (Luke 22:20), and so does Paul (1 Cor. 11:25). Although Scripture teaches that there is one people of God through the ages, Jesus’s death and resurrection inaugurates changes for those who know him. He is the “mediator of a new covenant” and ushers in the promises that Jeremiah made.

The church as God’s people is clarified through the images of the church. The church as God’s people are also the body of Christ (Col. 1:18), people united to Christ. The church is the bride of Christ (Eph. 5:25–32), people who are increasingly holy in Christ. The church is the temple of the Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19–20; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:19–22), people who are saints and indwelt by the Spirit. The church is the new humanity (Eph. 2:15; 4:13, 24), people who are reconciled to God. The church is the family of God (Rom. 8:15, 17; Gal. 4:4–5; 1 John 3:1), people who know God as Father and each other as brothers and sisters. As God’s people, the church belongs to him, and, amazingly, he belongs to the church. This truth will be fully realized only in the new heavens and earth, after God raises his own from the dead, glorifies them, and dwells among them (Rev. 21:1–4).

The Church and Its Mission

In Matthew 28:18–20, Jesus gives the Great Commission to his disciples, which becomes the marching orders for the church. He begins by asserting that he is the exalted Son who is Lord over all, both in heaven and on earth, and over all nations (28:18; see also Dan. 7:14). The universality of the commission is striking; Jesus has all authority, directs the disciples to make disciples of all nations, instructs them to teach all that he has commanded them, and charges them to do so “all the days,” until the end of the age.

The church not only has its origin in the eternal purposes of God with its roots in Israel, its basis in the saving work of Christ, its inauguration by the Holy Spirit, its life from union with Christ, and its end as the glory of God. The church is also God’s showcase for his eternal plan of bringing forth cosmic reconciliation and highlighting Christ as the focal point of all history. The church is to showcase not only God’s purposes but even God himself. In and through the church, God shows his grace, wisdom, love, unity, and holiness (the letter to the Ephesians emphasizes this). Moreover, as God displays himself, he glorifies himself. It is no wonder Paul proclaims, “Now to Him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us—to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (Eph. 3:20–21).

Further Reading

• Derek Thomas, “ What is the Church? ”
• Edmund P. Clowney, The Church
• G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God
• Gregg R. Allision, Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church
• Jonathan Leeman, “ What is a Local Church? ”
• Justin Taylor, “ What is the ‘Church’? ”
• Kendell H. Easley and Christopher W. Morgan, eds.,  The Community of Jesus: A Theology of the Church .
• Mark Dever, The Church: The Gospel Made Visible

This essay is part of the Concise Theology series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

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“The Origins of the Modern World” by Robert Marks

Introduction, marks’ alternative narrative, examples of the alternative narrative in the book, the concepts of historical contingency, accident, and conjuncture, the issue of eurocentrism, the reformation from marks’ point of view, works cited.

The history of the world has never been an easy thing to understand due to an enormous variety of interpretations and contradictory facts. However, the greatest amount of historical literature describes the world history from a rather limited and sometimes biased Western point of view. There is no doubt that Europe is the cradle of modern science and the motherland of many groundbreaking inventions, but there also exists an immensely rich Eastern world. Aiming to break with the commonplace one-sided approach to the historical development of the humankind, Robert Marks in his The Origins of the Modern World traces back the history of Eastern civilizations and their decisive impact on the West.

For the purposes of his alternative research, Marks establishes the alternative historical narrative. Its primary aim is to free the reader from the western-bound vision of the development of modern history. To Marks’ view, this narrative will give the reader a chance to define truly significant aspects of the western paradigm, and not those, which the historians try to impose in their works. The reader will be able to develop his point of view on the development of the world, apply critical thinking and follow his common sense. Moreover, the alternative narrative will help to evaluate our overall knowledge of the world history (Marks 10).

Marks’ story starts with the description of the 13th century when the world became globally connected for the first time; then he follows from the Industrial Revolution of the 18-19th century up to the 20th century. In each of those parts of his story, he devotes the primary attention to Asian world. It is very convenient for one to judge from his stable and reliable tower of deeply entrenched views, but such approach seems to be far from objectiveness and scientific nature. Marks shows that the Western is the not only possible way of thinking and that a good research should encompass all possible points of view.

Marks’ alternative narrative is supported by such concepts as historical contingency, accident, and conjuncture. The author assumes that the modern dominance of the Western world was not inevitable but happened due to contingency. Marks states that, “If not for a series of contingencies, accidents, and conjunctures, we might still be living in a world of agrarian empires” (13). The rise of the West was made possible thanks to the development of other states in the world, namely the Asian ones. Long before Europe became the mightiest subject of geopolitics, China and India had been highly developed and harmonious societies. And it was only in the 19th century that those countries from the ones that had “over half of the wealth in the world” turned into “the least industrialized and the poorest” ones (Marks 123).

The primary contingency for Marks was the China’s decision “in the early 1400s to abandon its naval domination of the Indian Ocean…and to remonetize its economy using silver, creating a new, global demand for silver that would soon be met by the New World suppliers” (200). India and China were highly developed agricultural societies, attractive for the Western traders. They were the principal suppliers of various goods, spices and crops, highly praised in Europe.

Another significant contingency was the discovery of immense reserves of precious metals and other natural resources in the New World, which motivated the Europeans to start the competition for the new lands. Marks also suggests that Islam was the key barrier to the European direct invasion to Asia; Europeans had to sail far away and establish business relations. The same way, the rise of the Industrial Revolution cannot be seen as the phenomenon caused solely by the internal European developments. If there were no countries to conduct trade with there would be no need for scientific progress and manufacturing technological development.

Referring to the issue of Eurocentrism, it should be noted that Marks emphasizes the difference between this concept and the notion of typical ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism suggests that there exist a big number of nations and people, they may interact with each other or be rivals. Each distinct nation considers herself the best. However, all the participants of this interaction will remain equal. In the case of Eurocentrism, there is only one European nation, which due to historical predisposition has to be the dominant one. It thus turns into the ideology that considers only the representatives of European continent the real masters of the world, culturally superior and the most progressive (Marks 8).

Marks concludes that Eurocentrism “is not only blind to the actual ebbs and flows of world history but now also informs the thinking of some American policymakers who attempt to impose those values on the rest of the world, by force if necessary” (200). In his research, Marks refuses from the Eurocentric approach. He emphasizes that Europe was not the only developed and prosperous civilization. When Europe suffered fragmentation, Eastern cultures remained stable and united. China had been the cradle of thousands of inventions long before Europe even emerged. Marks encourages us to look at the whole world as a subject of studies, not only its specific regions.

It may be interesting to consider some other historical events from Marks’ point of view. Let us take, for example, the Reformation. The Reformation was an XVI-XVII movement in Europe aimed at changing the spiritual and social-political life instilled by the Catholic Church. It is usually seen as a phenomenon caused by the internal preconditions. The feudal society supported by the ideological dogmas of the Catholic Church was coming to the end because of the people’s rebellion against the oppression. But if to look from a broader perspective, this movement was caused by the struggle between the representatives of the new capitalist mode of production and the defenders of feudalism. Taking into account Marks’ thesis about that the Industrial Revolution traces its roots from trade with China and India, one can say Reformation is also connected with the changes in the Asian realities.

All things considered, it can be stated that Robert Marks’ The Origins of the Modern World is a truly distinctive historical work that breaks up with modern stereotypes. From this book, the reader may learn how to perceive the world comprehensively and take into account the variety of actors in the world arena. It also teaches us not to underestimate the significance of unpredictable far-reaching events as well as to accept various reasons for the existing world and not just one. The author motivates us to be tolerant towards the representatives of other cultures. Moreover, Marks makes us think that the future era may be the period of the Eastern civilizations, and it is better for the Western one respect them.

Marks, Robert. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century . 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Print.

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The Origin of The Universe

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Words: 445 |

Published: Mar 1, 2019

Words: 445 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Alpher, R. A., Bethe, H. A., & Gamow, G. (1948). The Origin of Chemical Elements. Physical Review, 73(7), 803-804.
• Hawking, S. (1988). A Brief History of Time. Bantam.
• Hubble, E. (1929). A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 15(3), 168–173.
• Liddle, A. R. (2003). An Introduction to Modern Cosmology. Wiley.
• Penrose, R. (1965). Gravitational collapse and space-time singularities. Physical Review Letters, 14(3), 57–59.
• Planck Collaboration, Ade, P. A. R., Aghanim, N., Armitage-Caplan, C., Arnaud, M., Ashdown, M., ... & Zonca, A. (2015). Planck 2015 results—XIII. Cosmological parameters. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 594, A13.
• Rees, M. J. (2003). Our Cosmic Habitat. Princeton University Press.
• Riess, A. G., Filippenko, A. V., Challis, P., Clocchiatti, A., Diercks, A., Garnavich, P. M., ... & Tonry, J. (1998). Observational evidence from supernovae for an accelerating universe and a cosmological constant. The Astronomical Journal, 116(3), 1009-1038.
• Silk, J. (2001). The Big Bang. W. H. Freeman.
• Weinberg, S. (1972). Gravitation and cosmology: principles and applications of the general theory of relativity. Wiley.

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What is racism?

What are some of the societal aspects of racism, what are some of the measures taken to combat racism.

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Racism is the belief that humans can be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonization and empire-building activities of western Europeans, especially in the 18th century. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis. Most human societies have concluded that racism is wrong, and social trends have moved away from racism.

Historically, the practice of racism held that members of low-status “races” should be limited to low-status jobs or enslavement and be excluded from access to political power, economic resources, and unrestricted civil rights. The lived experience of racism for members of low-status races includes acts of physical violence, daily insults, and frequent acts and verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect.

Racism elicits hatred and distrust and precludes any attempt to understand its victims. Many societies attempt to combat racism by raising awareness of racist beliefs and practices and by promoting human understanding in public policies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights , adopted by the United Nations in 1948, is an example of one measure taken to combat racism. In the United States, the civil rights movement ’s fight against racism gained national prominence during the 1950s and has had lasting positive effects.

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racism , the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality , and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. The term is also applied to political, economic, or legal institutions and systems that engage in or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of race or otherwise reinforce racial inequalities in wealth and income, education , health care, civil rights, and other areas. Such institutional, structural, or systemic racism became a particular focus of scholarly investigation in the 1980s with the emergence of critical race theory , an offshoot of the critical legal studies movement. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I , that country’s deeply ingrained anti-Semitism was successfully exploited by the Nazi Party , which seized power in 1933 and implemented policies of systematic discrimination, persecution, and eventual mass murder of Jews in Germany and in the territories occupied by the country during World War II ( see Holocaust ).

In North America and apartheid -era South Africa , racism dictated that different races (chiefly blacks and whites) should be segregated from one another; that they should have their own distinct communities and develop their own institutions such as churches, schools, and hospitals; and that it was unnatural for members of different races to marry .

Historically, those who openly professed or practiced racism held that members of low-status races should be limited to low-status jobs and that members of the dominant race should have exclusive access to political power, economic resources, high-status jobs, and unrestricted civil rights . The lived experience of racism for members of low-status races includes acts of physical violence , daily insults, and frequent acts and verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect, all of which have profound effects on self-esteem and social relationships.

Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonization and empire-building activities of western Europeans, especially in the 18th century. The idea of race was invented to magnify the differences between people of European origin and those of African descent whose ancestors had been involuntarily enslaved and transported to the Americas. By characterizing Africans and their African American descendants as lesser human beings, the proponents of slavery attempted to justify and maintain the system of exploitation while portraying the United States as a bastion and champion of human freedom, with human rights , democratic institutions, unlimited opportunities, and equality. The contradiction between slavery and the ideology of human equality, accompanying a philosophy of human freedom and dignity, seemed to demand the dehumanization of those enslaved.

By the 19th century, racism had matured and spread around the world. In many countries, leaders began to think of the ethnic components of their own societies, usually religious or language groups, in racial terms and to designate “higher” and “lower” races. Those seen as the low-status races, especially in colonized areas, were exploited for their labour, and discrimination against them became a common pattern in many areas of the world. The expressions and feelings of racial superiority that accompanied colonialism generated resentment and hostility from those who were colonized and exploited, feelings that continued even after independence.

Since the mid-20th century many conflicts around the world have been interpreted in racial terms even though their origins were in the ethnic hostilities that have long characterized many human societies (e.g., Arabs and Jews, English and Irish). Racism reflects an acceptance of the deepest forms and degrees of divisiveness and carries the implication that differences between groups are so great that they cannot be transcended .

Racism elicits hatred and distrust and precludes any attempt to understand its victims. For that reason, most human societies have concluded that racism is wrong, at least in principle, and social trends have moved away from racism. Many societies have begun to combat racism by raising awareness of racist beliefs and practices and by promoting human understanding in public policies, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , set forth by the United Nations in 1948.

In the United States, racism came under increasing attack during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and laws and social policies that enforced racial segregation and permitted racial discrimination against African Americans were gradually eliminated. Laws aimed at limiting the voting power of racial minorities were invalidated by the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) to the U.S. Constitution , which prohibited poll taxes , and by the federal Voting Rights Act (1965), which required jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression to obtain federal approval (“preclearance”) of any proposed changes to their voting laws (the preclearance requirement was effectively removed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 [ see Shelby County v. Holder ]). By 2020 nearly three-quarters of the states had adopted varying forms of voter ID law , by which would-be voters were required or requested to present certain forms of identification before casting a ballot. Critics of the laws, some of which were successfully challenged in the courts, contended that they effectively suppressed voting among African Americans and other demographic groups. Other measures that tended to limit voting by African Americans were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders , partisan gerrymanders aimed at limiting the number of Democratic representatives in state legislatures and Congress, the closing of polling stations in African American or Democratic-leaning neighbourhoods, restrictions on the use of mail-in and absentee ballots, limits on early voting, and purges of voter rolls.

Despite constitutional and legal measures aimed at protecting the rights of racial minorities in the United States, the private beliefs and practices of many Americans remained racist, and some group of assumed lower status was often made a scapegoat. That tendency has persisted well into the 21st century.

Because, in the popular mind, “race” is linked to physical differences among peoples, and such features as dark skin colour have been seen as markers of low status, some experts believe that racism may be difficult to eradicate . Indeed, minds cannot be changed by laws, but beliefs about human differences can and do change, as do all cultural elements.