ABSTRACT

Just as light cuts through darkness, the philosophy of the Enlightenment was seen as something that would open the eyes of the world’s poor and free them from unjust rule. During the ‘century of Enlightenment’, educated Europeans awoke to a new sense of life and many wrote of ‘enlightening’ the world and the need to disseminate knowledge among ‘enlightened peoples’. According to Gay (1973: 3), at this time educated Europeans experienced ‘an expansive sense of power over nature and themselves: the pitiless cycles of epidemics, famines, risky life and early death, devastating war and uneasy peace – the treadmill of human existence – seemed to be yielding at last to the application of critical intelligence’. Fear of change began to give way to fear of stagnation. It was a century of commitment to enquiry and criticism, of a decline in mysticism, of growing hope and trust in effort and innovation (Hampson 1968). One of the primary interests was social reform, and the progression and development of societies built around an increasing secularism and a growing willingness to take risks (Gay 1973). There is no monolithic ‘spirit of the age’ that can be discerned, however. Enlightenment ideas and writings comprise a fairly heterogeneous group, but did form a set of interconnected ideas, values, principles and assumptions. In its simplest sense, the Enlightenment was the creation of a new framework of ideas and secure ‘truths’ about the relationships between humanity, society and nature, which sought to challenge traditional world views dominated by Christianity.