ABSTRACT
Intellectual changes did not keep pace with economic and social alterations: for most Europeans daily life did not change at a rate permitting much modification of thought. The temper of the bourgeoisie, however, in harmony with the unique mode of its activity, had differed since the beginning from that of the warrior or the priest. As commercial, financial, and industrial capitalism accented its progress and undermined medieval economy and society, bourgeois aspirations broke sharply with traditional ideas. Experimental rationalism had laid the foundations of modern science and in the eighteenth century promised to embrace all man’s activity. It armed the bourgeoisie with a new philosophy which, especially in France, encouraged class consciousness and a bold inventive spirit. On the eve of the French Revolution the leaders of the Enlightenment were dead, but their thought survived intact. Their intellectual legacy remained unusually complex, and, in addition, the Old Regime did not lack defenders. European thought of this period therefore offers a picture of diversity and dynamism, at least in the three countries which testified best to its vitality: England, Germany, and France.
