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But through the pages of time we learn and build a base for future improvements. The Enlightenment was truly a time of reflection on the individual and how we in turn affect society and the world. We must first look to the roots of this movement to understand what it is that provoked such a change of thought. The Scientific Revolution definitely supported the growth in pivotal minds that influenced society’s view of reality. The procedure of raising questions led to unanswered calls for reason. The impermeable religious portrait now began to show cracks. Inquiring minds that maintained faith in an almighty overseer swayed towards a Deist understanding of the universe. Deist people sought faith in a rational God and so evolved this new “natural religion.” Reason alone became the prevailing sovereign leader. The writings of John Locke supported the progress of personal enhancement in the Enlightenment. He understood the fundamental beliefs in religion yet enforced equality and peaceful toleration. In An Essay on Toleration printed in 1689 Locke stated “all religions were worthy of respect, none of priority.” His belief that humankind was born “morally neutral, if not instinctively good” (688) contradicted the traditional Christian faith in original sin. He built the idea of a social contract between the individual and society. Locke believed that “Society itself was the voluntary association of free, equal, and separate individuals as free, equal, and united members of a group.” Locke‘s Treatises have been attributed to the liberating ideals that the founders of our country based our representative government upon. He indulged in the idea of associative community come together to create a form of democratic self-ruling government. Jointly, sovereign individuals should implement positive government reigning over them. The American Revolution was greatly influenced by Locke’s idea of “natural rights.” It was these radical changes in thought caused by political leaders such as Locke that shaped nature of the Enlightenment. Other leaders followed Locke in cultivating new understandings of society. They came to be referred to as philosophes. The respected Denis Diderot created an Encyclopedia that defined a philosophe as “one who, ‘trampling on predudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in a word all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for [himself and]… to admit nothing except the testimony of his experience and reason.’” (689) Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), a prominent bourgeois philosophe, connected the characteristics of the Enlightenment to the scientific revolution through his publication of Elements of the Philosophy of Newton in 1738. He has been favored as a satirical playwright and noted for his revered work on the novel Candide written in 1759. He echoed the same quality of thought as John Locke. Voltaire posed that “no culture had a monopoly on beauty or value, just as no religion had a monopoly on truth.” (690) The philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Geneva, offered a radical view on the origins of society. He believed that society was subject to the sin of possession and that property is the root of all evil. We find his solution in The Social Contract where Rousseau states that the common good of society should come first and individual private interest should always be subordinate to the focus on the collective whole. Locke interpreted the meaning of a “social contract” as the freedom of all people to pursue their own personal interests with the inevitable cause of “inequity, oppression, and lost of freedom.” (691) Whereas Hobbes saw all people being equal under an absolute ruler, but none free. Rousseau’s view guarantees freedom and equality for all individuals who give everything for the betterment of the whole creating a just society. This ideal is mimicked in our Declaration of Independence. But it was the influence of Montesquieu, the philosophe author of The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, which aided in the understanding that government powers need to be separated to secure liberty. He instilled the idea of checks and balances found in our American Constitution and in many other ruling institutions as well. These ideals of the Enlightenment are repeated and strengthened through the inspirations of many brilliant intellectuals. The idea of balance and harmony is prevalent in the writings of this era. This new Newtonian universe is learning to obey its own new laws of reason without divine intervention. The downfall to the operation was fact that the elitists were the ones first exposed through the invention of the printing press and the use of salons to congregate and spread these monumental concepts. Slowly but surely the changes brought about by a newly enlightened breed of p Bibliography: Word Count: 820
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