The Enlightenment: What was it?
The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries stimulated a broader intellectual response known as the Enlightenment. Especially influential was the thought of Sir Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727) whose research revealed that the principles governing the natural world can be discovered and understood through reason. As was the Renaissance, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement having great impact on the development of Western thought. A simple definition follows.
The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement characterized by the application of scientific thought and stressing humanity's rational powers to gain an understanding of the "natural laws" seen as governing human thought and action (i.e., social institutions and practices, religions, governments, economics, values, etc.).
Historian John Merriman identifies the Enlightenment as a period “of contagious intellectual energy and enthusiastic quest for knowledge” through which “thinkers and writers… believed their role was to bring light and progress to the world through the application of reason to their reflections on the nature of mankind” (Merriman 399). The Enlightenment was centered primarily in France, and its great names – Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Rousseau – continue to live through writings that remain relevant today. They will be considered in a later section of this book.
Newton, of course, provided the scientific impetus with his thinking on natural laws. Natural laws are those scientifically proven undeniable truths governing the natural universe. They are arrived at through reason. The forces that enable the Earth’s rotation around the sun are explained through natural law. Reason proves it true. But, are there natural laws that apply to human institutions such as government? Are there rational scientific explanations that underlie such institutions? The thinkers of the Enlightenment would answer such questions with a resounding yes. If this were the case, then could not those natural laws be discovered and humanity reconstruct its institutions in accordance with those laws? Again, yes. And, would the result not be overall improvement of the human condition? Yes! And, as all human beings presumably have the same ability to think rationally, would not understanding of these laws and their application be universal? Yes, yes, yes. The Enlightenment, consequently, was an expression of great optimism for humanity’s future. Discovery of the natural laws governing human thought and action would result in a better future for all. Such was the promise of science.
The Enlightenment’s confidence in the supremacy of logic and reasoned understanding of the natural universe remained relatively unchallenged for most of the 18th and well into the 19th century. True, there were reactions to it as reflected in the emotionally-charged humanitarian writing of Rousseau and the later Romanticists, but, overall, confidence in the inviolability of natural laws remained in place.