ABSTRACT
The new philosophical order that descended over Great Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries from the end of the seventeenth century, incorporates in its outlook a cultural interest in nature and in people from distant parts of the globe. The discoveries and experimental methods performed by the giants of the sciences in the seventeenth century were fundamental to their later development. What philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and other Encyclopedistes announced, was a new era for humanity. Reports by travelers and missionaries about the religion and culture of Oriental lands such as India, Siam (Thailand), Egypt, and China, stirred an enormous curiosity among thinkers, and awoke interest in establishing comparisons with the traditional religious precepts, as well as with the moral and ethical ones upon which the European civilization was based.
