The key ideas

Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 2019

Every thought that seems obvious to you was once a bold invention. Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto guides you through humanity's history of ideas, from the first burials to quantum physics and postmodernism. He shows how ideas are born and why progress in thinking is by no means guaranteed.

Who it is for

For anyone who wants to understand where our beliefs about God, power, science and justice came from, and to see the whole history of human thought in a single book.

We build the world out of what we first imagined, so the history of ideas is the history of ourselves.

What the book is about

Where did you get the idea that all people are equal? Or that the world has laws waiting to be discovered? It feels as if these things are simply obvious. But once upon a time, someone thought up each of them for the first time. And before that moment, they just didn't exist.

Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto took on a daring task: to tell the history of all humanity's ideas in a single book. From the first people who buried their dead to the scientists who took time and space apart. He shows that ideas are not decoration on history but its engine. We build the world out of what we first imagined. You've already taken a rare step: you've chosen to look not at events but at the thoughts behind them. After this book, familiar beliefs will start to look different, like inventions with a date of birth.

Idea 1. We can see what isn't there

Why was it humans, and not chimpanzees, who invented gods, money and laws? The author's answer is surprising: it all comes down to a memory that doesn't work very well.

Fernández-Armesto reminds us that other animals think too. Apes have their own tricks that get passed from older to younger ones. But humans stand out for the sheer scale of their imagination. And imagination, the author argues, grows out of two abilities. The first is memory, which constantly distorts the past a little and assembles new pictures from fragments. The second is anticipation, the ability to picture what hasn't happened yet. When you remember the past inaccurately and project it onto the future, something is born that never existed before. That is an idea.

The mistake is to see imperfect memory only as a flaw. For the author, it's a source of creativity.

What this means for you: every “what if?” in your head is the same force that once created civilization.

You remember your grandmother's house, and in your memory it's a bit bigger and brighter than it really was. You add a porch that was never there, and suddenly you realize what kind of house you'd like to build yourself. That's imagination at work.

Ideas are born where memory meets a dream of the future.

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About the author

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a British historian of Spanish descent, a professor at the University of Notre Dame in the US, and the author of many books on world history.

All books by this author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Terms from the book

  • Imagination: The ability to picture what isn't in front of your eyes. According to the author, it grows out of memory and the ability to anticipate the future.
  • Renaissance: An era in Europe when educated people turned to the legacy of the ancient Greeks and Romans to find new paths in art and knowledge.
  • Enlightenment: An era when reason, human rights and criticism of the old order moved to the center of thought. The author stresses that it was shaped by encounters with other cultures.
  • Social Darwinism: Applying the idea of natural selection to societies and peoples, as if the strong had the right to push out the weak. The author shows its dangerous consequences.
  • Postmodernists: Thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century who argued that any truth depends on point of view and language.
  • Fundamentalism: Clinging to rigid dogmas and a literal reading of a teaching as a response to an uncertain world.

All terms

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