ABSTRACT
The impact of European overseas discoveries played an important if sometimes elusive role in the wide-ranging debate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the origins and nature of society and government. The discovery of the New World, as Locke had said, "enlarged the sphere of contemplation'; or, to put it another way, had stimulated discussion on how 'civilized' man (that is, usually, western European man) had developed from his 'savage' ancestors. It was a debate affected by the overseas explorations, scientific discoveries and intellectual movements of the post-Renaissance era, and was accompanied by wistful queries as to whether the early stages of mankind's existence were not superior to and more rational than the current state, whether men, morally at least, might not have degenerated rather than advanced. The context of the argument was different from that of earlier centuries which were still dominated by Europe's classical and biblical heritage. The struggle to make the mounting now of facts about societies across the globe fit into the philosophical assumptions of that heritage had been largely abandoned, and each new account of exotic peoples and their strange customs increased the need to provide alternative interpretations of man's origins and development.
