ABSTRACT
The Age of Reason existed between the second half of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century, between what could be described as the Age of Faith and the Age of Ideologies. It was a period in which beliefs were not accompanied by the urge to convert; it did not, therefore, contain the more aggressive tendencies of the Reformation and Counter Reformation before 1648 or of the series of ‘isms’ spawned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An integral part of the new mentality was the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the philosophers of which entirely abandoned the previous assumption that human nature per se was imperfect and therefore in need of divine direction. Instead, the emphasis was placed on deducing from Nature certain precepts which would make possible a new advance towards perfection in human institutions. The basic requirement for this progression was not divine revelation but human Reason.
