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She begins in the 5th century B.C., when Democritus formulated his atomism, locating the ultimate nature of things in matter rather than divinity.

Thomas Bradwardine, who was to become archbishop of Canterbury, tried to disprove atomism, Aristotle’s old nemesis.

It was his familiarity with atomism which made it possible for Bacon, exceptionally and presciently, to dismiss human sensory organs as inherently defective and often misleading.

The “seeds of disease” were almost certainly influenced by Democritean atomism and took inspiration from the Roman poet Lucretius, whose work had been rediscovered in the 15th century.

But such a system, critics have long said, breeds not autonomy but atomism, not fairness but inequality, not fulfillment but emptiness, not culture but anarchy.