Chapter 17

Each age builds upon the foundations of the one that precedes it; and never was this truer than the way the eighteenth century built upon the seventeenth. The seventeenth century’s revolution in science led directly to the eighteenth century’s revolution in philosophy, which we call the Enlightenment.

The popularization of science, the growth of a healthy skepticism about tradition, the writings of world travelers, and the legacy of thinkers like John Locke and Isaac Newton brought about an eighteenth century flowering of philosophy which is considered one of the high points of Western civilization. The philosophes (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau) left a body of thought and writing that is unsurpassed in European history.

It was also an age of innovation in the arts. Rococo painting and architecture, classical music, and the birth of the novel all added style and color to the age. In the social sciences various writers began critically commenting on education, crime and punishment, and the social and economic causes behind historical events. The stage was set for modern scholarship.

Christianity, which the philosophes blamed for many human woes, found itself in a hostile environment. The institutional church was branded archaic, and many intellectuals left it for what they considered a more respectable deism. Yet among the common people the traditional faith continued to have strong appeal and tenacity. A new era of piety swept both Protestant and Catholic camps; and England particularly experienced a new phenomenon, the popular revival meetings of John Wesley.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was the product of a revolution in science; and the ideas it so freely disseminated helped usher in the age of political and industrial revolution to come. It was both the child and the parent of revolutions.