The great Chinese philosopher Confucius was the first man to develop a system of beliefs synthesizing the basic ideas of the Chinese people. His philosophy, based on personal morality and on the concept of a government that served its people and ruled by moral example, permeated Chinese life and culture for well
over two thousand years, and has greatly influenced a substantial portion of the world's population.
Confucius was born about 551 B.C., in the small state of Lu, which is in the present province of Shantung, in northeastern China. His father died when he was quite young, and Confucius and his mother lived in poverty. As a young man, the future philosopher served as a minor government official, but after several years he resigned his post. He spent the next sixteen years teaching, attracting a considerable number of disciples to his philosophy. When he was about fifty years old, he was awarded a high position in the government of Lu; however, after about four years, enemies at court brought about his dismissal, and, in deed, his exile from the state. He spent the next thirteen years as an itinerant teacher, and then returned to his home state for the
last five years of his life. He died in 479 b.c.
Confucius is often credited as the founder of a religion, but this description is inaccurate. He very rarely referred to the Deity, refused to discuss the afterlife, and avoided all forms of metaphysical speculation. He was basically a secular philosopher, interested in personal and political morality and conduct.
Gautama Buddha, whose original name was Prince Siddhartha, was the founder of Buddhism, one of the world's great religions. Siddhartha was the son of a king ruling in Kapilavastu, a city innortheast India, near the borders of Nepal. Siddhartha himself (of the clan of Gautama and the tribe of Sakya) was purportedly born in 563 B.C., in Lumbini, within the present borders of Nepal. He was married at sixteen to a cousin of the same age. Brought up in the luxurious royal palace, Prince Siddhartha did not want for material comforts. Nevertheless, he was profoundly dissatisfied. He observed that most human beings were poor and continually suffered from want. Even those who were wealthy were frequently frustrated and unhappy, and all men were subject to disease and ultimately succumbed to death. Surely, Siddhartha thought, there must be more to life than transitory pleasures, which were all too soon obliterated by suffering and death. When he was twenty-nine, just after the birth of his first son, Gautama decided that he must abandon the life he was living and devote himself wholeheartedly to the search for truth. He departed from the palace, leaving behind his wife, his infant son, and all his worldly possessions, and became a penniless wanderer. For a while he studied with some of the famed holy men of the day, but after mastering their teachings, he found their solutions to the problems of the human situation unsatisfactory. It was widely believed that extreme asceticism was the pathway to true wisdom. Gautama therefore attempted to become an ascetic, for several years engaging in extreme fasts and self-mortification. Eventually, however, he realized that tormenting his body only clouded his brain, without leading him any closer to true wisdom. He therefore resumed eating normally, and abandoned asceticism. In solitude, he grappled with the problems of human existence. Finally, one evening, as he sat beneath a giant fig tree, all the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fall into place. Siddhartha spent the whole night in deep reflection, and when the morning came, he was convinced that he had found the solution and that he was now a Buddha, an "enlightened one." At this time, he was thirty-five years old. For the remaining forty-five years of his life, he traveled throughout northern India, preaching his new philosophy to all who were willing to listen. By the time he died, in 483 B.C., he had made thousands of converts. Though his words had not been written down, his disciples had memorized many of his teachings, and they were passed to succeeding generations by word of mouth.
The impact of Jesus on human history is so obvious and so enormous that few people would question his placement near the top of this list. Indeed, the more likely question is why Jesus, who is the inspiration for the most influential religion in history, has not been placed first.
There is no question that Christianity, over the course of time, has had far more adherents than any other religion. However, it is not the relative influence of different religions that is being estimated in this book, but rather the relative influence of individual men. Christianity, unlike Islam, was not founded by a single person but by two people—Jesus and St. Paul—and the principal credit for its development must therefore be apportioned between those two figures.
Jesus formulated the basic ethical ideas of Christianity,as well as its basic spiritual outlook and its main ideas concerning human conduct. Christian theology, however, was shaped principally by the work of St. Paul. Jesus presented a spiritual message; Paul added to that the worship of Christ. Furthermore, St. Paul was the author of a considerable portion of the New Testament, and was the main proselytizing force for Christianity during the first century.
Jesus was still fairly young when he died (unlike Buddha or Muhammad), and he left behind a limited number of disciples. At the time of Jesus' death, his followers simply formed a small Jewish sect. It was due in considerable measure to Paul's writings, and to his tireless proselytizing efforts, that this small sect was transformed into a dynamic and much greater movement, which reached non-Jews as well as Jews, and which eventually grew into one of the great religions of the world.
Isaac Newton, the greatest and most influential scientist whoever lived, was born in Woolsthorpe, England, on Christmas Day, 1642, the same year that Galileo died. Like Muhammad, he was born after the death of his father. As a child, he showed considerable mechanical aptitude, and was very clever with his hands. Although a bright child, he was inattentive in school and did not attract much attention. When he was a teenager, his mother took him out of school, hoping that he would become a successful farmer. Fortunately, she was persuaded that his principal talents lay elsewhere, and at eighteen, he entered Cambridge University. There, he rapidly absorbed what was then known of science and mathematics, and soon moved on to his own independent research. Between his twenty-first andtwenty-seventh years, he laid the foundations for the scientific theories that subsequently revolutionized the world. The middle of the seventeenth century was a period of great scientific ferment. The invention of the telescope near the beginning of the century had revolutionized the entire study of astronomy. The English philosopher Francis Bacon and the French philosopher Rene Descartes had both urged scientists throughout Europe to cease relying on the authority of Aristotle and to experiment and observe for themselves. What Bacon and Descartes had preached, the great Galileo had practiced. His astronomical observations, using the newly invented telescope, had revolutionized the study of astronomy, and his mechanical experiments had established what is now known as Newton's first law of motion.
My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels.
Of humble origins, Muhammad founded and promulgated one of the world's great religions, and became an immensely effective political leader. Today, thirteen centuries after his death, his influence is still powerful and pervasive.
The majority of the persons in this book had the advantage of being born and raised in centers of civilization, highly cultured or politically pivotal nations. Muhammad, however, was born in the year 570, in the city of Mecca, in southern Arabia, at that time a backward area of the world, far from the centers of trade, art, and learning. Orphaned at age six, he was reared in modest surroundings. Islamic tradition tells us that he was illiterate. His economic position improved when, at age twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow. Nevertheless, as he approached forty, there was little outward indication that he was a remarkable person.
Most Arabs at that time were pagans, who believed in many gods. There were, however, in Mecca, a small number of Jews and Christians; it was from them no doubt that Muhammad first learned of a single, omnipotent God who ruled the entire universe. When he was forty years old, Muhammad became convinced that this one true God (Allah) was speaking to him, and had chosen him to spread the true faith.
For three years, Muhammad preached only to close friends and associates. Then, about 613, he began preaching in public. As he slowly gained converts, the Meccan authorities came to consider him a dangerous nuisance. In 622, fearing for his safety, Muhammad fled to Medina (a city some 200 miles north of Mecca), where he had been offered a position of considerable political power.
In his book Letters on the English, Voltaire relates that during his stay in England, in 1726, he overheard some learned men discussing the question: who was the greatest man@Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? One speaker maintained that Sir Isaac Newton was beyond a doubt the greatest man. Voltaire agreed with this judgment, for: "It is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence." Whether Voltaire was truly convinced that Sir Isaac Newton was the greatest man who ever lived or was simply trying to make a philosophical point, the anecdote raises an interesting question: of the billions of human beings who have populated the earth, which persons have most influenced the course of history? This book presents my own answer to that question, my list of the 100 persons in history whom I believe to have been the most influential. I must emphasize that this is a list of the most influential persons in history, not a list of the greatest. For example, there is room in my list for an enormously influential, wicked, and heartless man like Stalin, but no place at all for the saintly Mother Cabrini.
100 Most Influential People in History by Michael H. Heart
In his book on English Literature, Voltaire - when he was in the country in 1726 - heard there was discussion among scholars regarding: who the most excellent human being. Caesar? Alexander? Tamerlane? or Cromwell? One of the participants said, no doubt must have been Sir Isaac Newton, the son of expert champions. Voltaire got along with these choices with consideration, "It is she who guides us have minds with the power of truth, not bound by the violence. Therefore we should respect and greetings and owe incalculable."
Do you really believe Sir Isaac Newton Voltaire smartest man in the universe, or is just trying to, displaying a philosophical problem because the appointment would provoke follow-up questions: of several billion human beings ever born in the world, who among those who have influence on the course of history?
This book is my answer. There are a hundred human child in the list I compiled and I am sure the hundredth person that determines the direction of the course of history. Need I point out, they were not human beings in terms of "greatest," but in the sense of the most influential in history. For example, I put Stalin on the list, because of its influence in history, whether she was fierce and devilish. On the other hand, the saints and sacred as Mother Carini, no.
