ABSTRACT
The notion of light embedded in the word Enlightenment is present in most European languages – German’s Aufklärung, for example, is matched by the Italian illuminismo, while in French the Age of Enlightenment was le siècle des lumières [‘the age of lights’]. In all cases, the light was the light of human reason, figured as dispelling the forces of darkness (prejudice, superstition, ignorance, etc.). Human reason, it was held, operated through the scientific method pioneered in the previous century. Enlightenment thinkers eschewed a pRioRi (that is, derived from first principles) thinking, rejected scriptural revelation and valued inductive, empirical approaches. Their heroes were
seventeenth-century English figures: arch-empiricists Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke (1632-1704) and, especially, Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Newton was the patron saint of Enlightenment. His law of gravity demonstrated reason’s capacity for unlocking the secrets of the natural world. Post-Newton, the universe could be viewed more as a precise mechanism strictly observing general rules than as an unintelligible, divinely inspired mystery. The laudatory couplet by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), intended as Newton’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey, caught the Enlightenment mood – and metaphor – exactly: ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, “Let Newton Be” and all was light’ (1730). The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century had achieved breakthroughs in the ‘hard sciences’, notably astronomy (Galileo Galilei, Newton), chemistry (Robert Boyle), physics (Newton) and biology (William Harvey). This kind of
research continued and prospered in the Enlightenment. The Swedish natural historian Linnaeus (1707-78), for example, devised modern botanical nomenclature, the comte de Buffon’s (1707-88) Natural History was an impressive and enduring summation of the human and animal worlds, while in the 1780s Antoine Lavoisier (1743-94) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) effected a ‘chemical revolution’ with the discovery of oxygen and other gases. Yet what was also striking about the Enlightenment was the parallel effort to adapt scientific method for ‘softer’ forms of knowledge focused on the human rather than the natural world. Tellingly, the Enlightenment supplied many foundational figures in what became the social sciences – economics (François Quesnay, Adam Smith), linguistics (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), history (Giambattista Vico, Voltaire, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon), politics (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Edmund Burke – and the French Revolutionaries) and so on. The spirit of the age was opposed to excessive specialization. ‘Enlighteners’ saw themselves as all-round natuRal philosopheRs – the French term philosophes was widely used – with a purview over all forms of knowledge. The yardstick for the validity of reasoned knowledge was social utility and collective happiness. New knowledge was thus potential power – power to produce a rational and therefore (it was thought) contented and prosperous world. Contributors to the great multi-volumed ‘Bible of Enlightenment’, the encyclopéDie, edited by Denis Diderot (1713-84) and Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert (1717-83), were aware of this stirring venture. Diderot claimed that the aim of the philosophe enterprise, as expressed through the Encyclopédie was to
collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.
