THE TIME OF ENLIGHTENMENT

AFTER the culture of the Middle Ages passed its zenith, there began a gradual development in the intellectual spirit of Europe that was to culminate in the eighteenth century. Religion, which was the medieval basis for men's thinking on the problems of life, was slowly driven from its prominent position by knowledge of a more secular kind. At the same time, freedom to express unorthodox ideas advanced.

The humanism of the Renaissance marked the first big step along the path. The Reformation brought the next, although its leaders had not intended to do anything but strengthen the religious spirit of Christianity. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Christian church had lost the supreme social authority which it had always asserted. The Reformation had destroyed its unity, and out of the ensuing chaos came the reality, soon justified by the theory, of religious toleration. At the same time in many lands the church fell under state control. Even the most powerful of the various churches that now were claiming to be the sole interpreters of the teachings of Jesus no longer had its former political influence. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 was made against the wishes of the head of the Roman Catholic Church and accepted despite his condemnation. This flouting of the pope was symbolic of the determination — and ability — of Catholic princes in the future to be princes first and Catholics second.

By this date a new spirit of independence from traditional religion and theology was invading all fields of thought. Because of the stricter control of thought in Catholic countries, Protestant lands were in general the first scene of the new development. In England, Francis Bacon opened the seventeenth century by dismissing Aristotle, the authority on whom medieval Christian scientific and philosophic thought had rested, in favor of the direct observation of nature as the source of knowledge; and Isaac Newton closed it by publishing his profoundly influential discovery of the law of gravitation. Henceforth, the universe and man as part of it were looked upon more and more as subject to rational laws, laws which God meant for man to discover by reasoning upon facts observed directly in nature rather than by the study of revelation and ancient authorities. Political science felt the same emancipation. Hugo Grotius, in the Netherlands, writing on international law, gave currency to a new meaning for the time honored concept of the law of nature. Instead of being synonymous with Christian political doctrines derived from the commandments of the Bible, the term now meant a universally valid law for human society based on reason and the nature of man. John Locke followed at the end of the century by stating that men have natural rights, such as personal freedom and the possession of property, which they did not give up when they formed an agreement to enter into society, abandoning the state of nature in which Locke supposed they had originally existed. René Descartes, writing like other Frenchmen in the safety of voluntary exile, had in the meantime given metaphysics its freedom from scholastic theology. Descartes demonstrated the fallibility of all accepted sources of knowledge, including Christian philosophy, and then relied on his reason alone to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Locke thereupon laid the foundation for modern epistemology by destroying the belief, still accepted even by Descartes, that God placed certain basic ideas in the minds of men at birth. He asserted instead that man's information comes only from his sense perceptions. Finally the Christian religion itself was openly attacked. Benedict Spinoza, like Descartes consulting his reason alone, substituted for the anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian God, who created the universe, an impersonal, all-embracing concept of God that seemed to make him identical with the universe. In England, meanwhile, from an observation of the new multiplicity of the Christian sects and the newly discovered religions of other lands, a group known as deists evolved the idea of a natural religion, the true primitive religion, from which, they said, all others had departed. These men held that to worship God no instituted church was necessary; certainly no church was justified in receiving state support and persecuting dissenters.

Spinoza and the deists, it is true, were honored more by being detested than by being read, and it was Grotius, Descartes, Locke, and Newton who inspired their contemporaries. By the end of the seventeenth century, nevertheless, the basis for a lay, or at least a religiously unorthodox, outlook on life had been established in Protestant lands. The next hundred years was to see its penetration into Catholic countries and wide diffusion throughout Europe, a movement which has been called the Enlightenment. Early in the century, Voltaire brought back to France from England an admiration for the science of Newton and the philosophy of Locke. The French mind had already been prepared by Descartes, and Voltaire's enthusiasm was soon shared by a group of men who were referred to derisively as philosophes. Motivated by a deep faith in the ability of the human mind to learn the truths of nature through observation and reason, these men questioned all accepted beliefs. Locke's sensationalist theory of epistemology was carried to an extreme form by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and Claude Adrien Helvétius. The concept of natural religion became common, and even the need for the existence of God to explain natural phenomena was denied by materialist writers such as the Baron d'Holbach. The philosophes introduced their sensationalist and empirical spirit into a gigantic venture undertaken to gather all knowledge into one work of reference. This was the Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, which became famous as much for its iconoclastic approach to knowledge as for its useful collection of information.

Once the philosophes had made good their rupture with Catholic tradition, they turned their attention to the improvement of man's earthly lot. They refused to believe that because of an original fall man was doomed to depravity. They had a faith of their own in the natural goodness of man and his ability to perfect himself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not in complete agreement with the optimistic view of the encyclopedists, said that it was society that had...