ABSTRACT
The Age of Reason in eighteenth-century Europe, which was to a large extent the cultural source of the philosophies that ended up justifying the American Revolution, was a period of culture that put on a pedestal moralistic individualism. This philosophy was in many ways a secular version of Christian ideals of rationality where the individual accepted responsibility by identifying with and eventually copying the values of God as parent, in much the same way, though on a grander scale, as the way children copy the values of their real parents. However, this era was noted not only for people pondering the beginnings of a hoped-for golden age of rationality, but its possible faltering and eventual demise.
