Philip Marsden

Home was not where the heart was for the Enlightenment’s intellectuals

Emily Thomas describes how, from the 17th century onwards, the compulsion to understand the world was what drove the thoughtful to travel

Emily Thomas is a distinguished academic philosopher who has ‘spent a lot of time by herself getting lost around the world’. Here she takes a trip to the wastes of Alaska and uses it to launch an extended meditation on a compelling question: what does it mean to travel? What is the significance of our urge to set off around the globe — not for trade, not to fight or conquer, but for its own sake?

By narrowing her remit thus, Thomas begins in 17th-century Europe, with the restless spirit of the Enlightenment. So we have no Pytheas, no Odysseus, no Marco Polo, no Ibn Battuta. Travel in her specific sense began as the prodigal child of science. It was about investigation, learning, the compulsion to explain, to understand and systemise. On completing his formal education, Descartes left home to continue it at large: ‘Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling.’

Travel reduces the significance of home. As you travel further, your native habitat grows smaller

A generation earlier, Francis Bacon had already called for a complete natural history, a universal study to be conducted not by contemplation but by observation. In the frontispiece of The Great Instauration (Instauratio Magna) with its ambitious plan to restore all that there is to know, all that was lost at the Fall, a ship is set against a flat and distant horizon: ‘Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase,’ (Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia) reads the caption.

Travel became an empirical exercise. In London, the Royal Society met to discuss travel reports. It issued guidelines for the gathering of material (be sure to record longitude and latitude, climate, fishes and meteoric activity), and steered the itineraries of many inquisitive travellers towards places of interest — Greenland, the Caribbean, Hungary, Transylvania, Egypt and Persia.

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