Bygone Beliefs: Being a Series of Excursions in the Byways of Thought

In an age when we take scientific rationality for granted, this book invites us to walk through the labyrinth of human thought before science arrived. Redgrove traces the remarkable journey from primitive animism, the earliest human attempt to make sense of a world teeming with spirits and invisible forces, through the elaborate intellectual cathedrals of medieval philosophy. He illuminates how ancient thinkers like Pythagoras and the alchemists constructed profound systems of meaning, even when their conclusions would later be proven false. The book argues that understanding these bygone beliefs isn't merely academic exercise. It's essential to grasping how we arrived at our modern worldview, and humbling evidence that future ages may find our certainties equally strange. This is intellectual history with genuine adventure in its veins, a guided tour through the minds that came before ours.