ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three broad intellectual disciplines that are philosophical, scientific and historical endeavours were of interest to Europeans in our period. However, these three, particularly since the first of them included political, social and ethical speculation, offer a structure of sorts to what might otherwise become a formless survey. As for the Protestants, even a divine such as the University of Berlin's F. D. Schleiermacher, who addressed himself to a rethinking of God's relationship to his creatures, quite explicitly denied that religion must give practical, ethical guidance to those creatures in their relations with one another. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, the eighteenth was so regularly, and wrongly, dismissed as 'anti-historical' that more recent writing may actually have gone too far in the opposite direction, underestimating the changes in this field which did come only in the late 1700s and especially in the early 1800s.
