The Enlightenment was both a movement and a state of mind. The term represents a phase in the intellectual history of Europe, but it also serves to define programs of reform in which influential literati, inspired by a common faith in the possibility of a better world, outlined specific targets for criticism and proposals for action. The special significance of the Enlightenment lies in its combination of principle and pragmatism. Consequently, it still engenders controversy about its character and achievements. Two main questions and, relating to each, two schools of thought can be identified. Was the Enlightenment the preserve of an elite, centred on Paris, or a broad current of opinion that the philosophes, to some extent, represented and led? Was it primarily a French movement, having therefore a degree of coherence, or an international phenomenon, having as many facets as there were countries affected? Although most modern interpreters incline to the latter view in both cases, there is still a case for the French emphasis, given the genius of a number of the philosophes and their associates. Unlike other terms applied by historians to describe a phenomenon that they see more clearly than could contemporaries, it was used and cherished by those who believed in the power of mind to liberate and improve. Bernard de Fontenelle, popularizer of the scientific discoveries that contributed to the climate of optimism, wrote in 1702 anticipating a century which will become more enlightened day by day, so that all previous centuries will be lost in darkness by comparison. Reviewing the experience in 1784, Immanuel Kant saw an emancipation from superstition and ignorance as having been the essential characteristic of the Enlightenment.

Before Kants death the spirit of the sicle des Lumires (literally, century of the Enlightened) had been spurned by Romantic idealists, its confidence in mans sense of what was right and good mocked by revolutionary terror and dictatorship, and its rationalism decried as being complacent or downright inhumane. Even its achievements were critically endangered by the militant nationalism of the 19th century. Yet much of the tenor of the Enlightenment did survive in the liberalism, toleration, and respect for law that have persisted in European society. There was therefore no abrupt end or reversal of enlightened values.

Nor had there been such a sudden beginning as is conveyed by the critic Paul Hazards celebrated aphorism: One moment the French thought like Bossuet; the next moment like Voltaire. The perceptions and propaganda of the philosophes have led historians to locate the Age of Reason within the 18th century or, more comprehensively, between the two revolutionsthe English of 1688 and the French of 1789but in conception it should be traced to the humanism of the Renaissance, which encouraged scholarly interest in Classical texts and values. It was formed by the complementary methods of the Scientific Revolution, the rational and the empirical. Its adolescence belongs to the two decades before and after 1700 when writers such as Jonathan Swift were employing the artillery of words to impress the secular intelligentsia created by the growth in affluence, literacy, and publishing. Ideas and beliefs were tested wherever reason and research could challenge traditional authority.

In a cosmopolitan culture it was the preeminence of the French language that enabled Frenchmen of the 17th century to lay the foundations of cultural ascendancy and encouraged the philosophes to act as the tutors of 18th-century Europe. The notion of a realm of philosophy superior to sectarian or national concerns facilitated the transmission of ideas. I flatter myself, wrote Denis Diderot to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, that I am, like you, citizen of the great city of the world. A philosopher, wrote Edward Gibbon, may consider Europe as a great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation. This magisterial pronouncement by the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (177688) recalls the common source: the knowledge of Classical literature.

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The scholars of the Enlightenment recognized a joint inheritance, Christian as well as Classical. In rejecting, or at least reinterpreting, the one and plundering the other, they had the confidence of those who believed they were masters of their destiny. They felt an affinity with the Classical world and saluted the achievement of the Greeks, who discovered a regularity in nature and its governing principle, the reasoning mind, as well as that of the Romans, who adopted Hellenic culture while contributing a new order and style: on their law was founded much of church and civil law. Steeped in the ideas and language of the classics but unsettled in beliefs, some Enlightenment thinkers found an alternative to Christian faith in the form of a neo-paganism. The morality was based on reason; the literature, art, and architecture were already supplying rules and standards for educated taste.

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The first chapter of Voltaires Sicle de Louis XIV specified the four happy ages: the centuries of Pericles and Plato, of Cicero and Caesar, of the Medicean Renaissance, and, appositely, of Louis XIV. The contrast is with the ages of belief, which were wretched and backward. Whether denouncing Gothic taste or clerical fanaticism, writers of the Enlightenment constantly resort to images of relapse and revival. Typically, Jean dAlembert wrote in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopdie of a revival of letters, regeneration of ideas, and return to reason and good taste. The philosophes knew enough to be sure that they were entering a new golden age through rediscovery of the old but not enough to have misgivings about a reading of history which, being grounded in a culture that had self-evident value, provided ammunition for the secular crusade.

The new philosophy puts all in doubt, wrote the poet John Donne. Early 17th-century poetry and drama abounded in expressions of confusion and dismay about the world, God, and man. The gently questioning essays of the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, musing on human folly and fanaticism, continued to be popular long after his time, for they were no less relevant to the generation that suffered from the Thirty Years War. Unsettling scientific views were gaining a hold. As the new astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo, with its heliocentric view, was accepted, the firm association between religious beliefs, moral principles, and the traditional scheme of nature was shaken. In this process, mathematics occupied the central position. It was, in the words of Ren Descartes, the general science which should explain all that can be known about quantity and measure, considered independently of any application to a particular subject. It enabled its practitioners to bridge gaps between speculation and reasonable certainty: Johannes Kepler thus proceeded from his study of conic sections to the laws of planetary motion. When, however, Fontenelle wrote of Descartes, Sometimes one man gives the tone to a whole century, it was not merely of his mathematics that he was thinking. It was the system and philosophy that Descartes derived from the application of mathematical reasoning to the mysteries of the worldall that is meant by Cartesianismwhich was so influential. The method expounded in his Discourse on Method (1637) was one of doubt: all was uncertain until established by reasoning from self-evident propositions, on principles analogous to those of geometry. It was serviceable in all areas of study. There was a mechanistic model for all living things.

A different track had been pursued by Francis Bacon, the great English lawyer and savant, whose influence eventually proved as great as that of Descartes. He called for a new science, to be based on organized and collaborative experiment with a systematic recording of results. General laws could be established only when research had produced enough data and then by inductive reasoning, which, as described in his Novum Organum (1620), derives from particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. These must be tried and proved by further experiments. Bacons method could lead to the accumulation of knowledge. It also was self-correcting. Indeed, it was in some ways modern in its practical emphasis. Significantly, whereas the devout humanist Thomas More had placed his Utopia in a remote setting, Bacon put New Atlantis (1627) in the future. Knowledge is power, he said, perhaps unoriginally but with the conviction that went with a vision of mankind gaining mastery over nature. Thus were established the two poles of scientific endeavour, the rational and the empirical, between which enlightened man was to map the ground for a better world.

Bacons inductive method is flawed through his insufficient emphasis on hypothesis. Descartes was on strong ground when he maintained that philosophy must proceed from what is definable to what is complex and uncertain. He wrote in French rather than the customary Latin so as to exploit its value as a vehicle for clear and logical expression and to reach a wider audience. Cartesian rationalism, as applied to theology, for example by Nicholas Malebranche, who set out to refute the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, was a powerful solvent of traditional belief: God was made subservient to reason. While Descartes maintained his hold on French opinion, across the Channel Isaac Newton, a prodigious mathematician and a resourceful and disciplined experimenter, was mounting a crucial challenge. His Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) ranks with the Discourse on Method in authority and influence as a peak in the 17th-century quest for truth. Newton did not break completely with Descartes and remained faithful to the latters fundamental idea of the universe as a machine. But Newtons machine operated according to a series of laws, the essence of which was that the principle of gravitation was everywhere present and efficient. The onus was on the Cartesians to show not only that their mechanics gave a truer explanation but also that their methods were sounder. Christiaan Huygens was both a loyal disciple of Descartes and a formidable mathematician and inventor in his own right, who had worked out the first tenable theory of centrifugal force. His dilemma is instructive. He acknowledged that Newtons assumption of forces acting between members of the solar system was justified by the correct conclusions he drew from it, but he would not go on to accept that attraction was affecting every pair of particles, however minute. When Newton identified gravitation as a property inherent in corporeal matter, Huygens thought that absurd and looked for an agent acting constantly according to certain laws. Some believed that Newton was returning to occult qualities. Eccentricities apart, his views were not easy to grasp; those who actually read the Principia found it painfully difficult. Cartesianism was more accessible and appealing.

Gradually, however, Newtons work won understanding. One medium, ironically, was an outstanding textbook of Cartesian physics, Jacques Rohaults Trait de physique (1671), with detailed notes setting out Newtons case. In 1732 Pierre-Louis de Mauperthuis put the Cartesians on the defensive by his defense of Newtons right to employ a principle the cause of which was yet unknown. In 1734, in his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire introduced Newton as the destroyer of the system of Descartes. His authority clinched the issue. Newtons physics was justified by its successful application in different fields. The return of Halleys comet was accurately predicted. Charles Coulombs torsion balance proved that Newtons law of inverse squares was valid for electromagnetic attraction. Cartesianism reduced nature to a set of habits within a world of rules; the new attitude took note of accidents and circumstances. Observation and experiment revealed nature as untidy, unpredictablea tangle of conflicting forces. In classical theory, reason was presumed to be common to all human beings and its laws immutable. In Enlightenment Europe, however, there was a growing impatience with systems. The most creative of scientists, such as Boyle, Harvey, and Leeuwenhoek, found sufficient momentum for discovery on sciences front line. The controversy was creative because both rational and empirical methods were essential to progress. Like the literary battle between the ancients and the moderns or the theological battle between Jesuits and Jansenists, the scientific debate was a school of advocacy.

If Newton was supremely important among those who contributed to the climate of the Enlightenment, it is because his new system offered certainties in a world of doubts. The belief spread that Newton had explained forever how the universe worked. This cautious, devout empiricist lent the imprint of genius to the great idea of the Enlightenment: that man, guided by the light of reason, could explain all natural phenomena and could embark on the study of his own place in a world that was no longer mysterious. Yet he might otherwise have been aware more of disintegration than of progress or of theories demolished than of truths established. This was true even within the expanding field of the physical sciences. To gauge the mood of the world of intellect and fashion, of French salons or of such institutions as the Royal Society, it is essential to understand what constituted the crisis in the European mind of the late 17th century.

At the heart of the crisis was the critical examination of Christian faith, its foundations in the Bible, and the authority embodied in the church. In 1647 Pierre Gassendi had revived the atomistic philosophy of Lucretius, as outlined in On the Nature of Things. He insisted on the Divine Providence behind Epicurus atoms and voids. Critical examination could not fail to be unsettling because the Christian view was not confined to questions of personal belief and morals, or even history, but comprehended the entire nature of Gods world. The impact of scientific research must be weighed in the wider context of an intellectual revolution. Different kinds of learning were not then as sharply distinguished, because of their appropriate disciplines and terminology, as they are in an age of specialization. At that time philomaths could still be polymaths. Newtons contemporary, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnizwhose principal contribution to philosophy was that substance exists only in the form of monads, each of which obeys the laws of its own self-determined development while remaining in complete accord with all the restinfluenced his age by concluding that since God contrived the universal harmony this world must be the best of all possible worlds. He also proposed legal reforms, invented a calculating machine, devised a method of the calculus independent of Newtons, improved the drainage of mines, and laboured for the reunification of the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches.

The writing of John Locke, familiar to the French long before the eventual victory of his kind of empiricism, further reveals the range of interests that an educated man might pursue and its value in the outcome: discrimination, shrewdness, and originality. The journal of Lockes travels in France (167579) is studded with notes on botany, zoology, medicine, weather, instruments of all kinds, and statistics, especially those concerned with prices and taxes. It is a telling introduction to the world of the Enlightenment, in which the possible was always as important as the ideal and physics could be more important than metaphysics. Locke spent the years from 1683 to 1689 in Holland, in refuge from high royalism. There he associated with other literary exiles, who were united in abhorrence of Louis XIVs religious policies, which culminated in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the flight of more than 200,000 Huguenots. During this time Locke wrote the Essay on Toleration (1689). The coincidence of the Huguenot dispersion with the English revolution of 168889 meant a cross-fertilizing debate in a society that had lost its bearings. The avant-garde accepted Lockes idea that the people had a sovereign power and that the prince was merely a delegate. His Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) offered a theoretical justification for a contractual view of monarchy on the basis of a revocable agreement between ruler and ruled. It was, however, his writings about education, toleration, and morality that were most influential among the philosophes, for whom his political theories could be only of academic interest. Locke was the first to treat philosophy as purely critical inquiry, having its own problems but essentially similar to other sciences. Voltaire admired what Locke called his historical plain method because he had not written a romance of the soul but offered a history of it. The avowed object of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge; together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent. For Locke, the mind derives the materials of reason and knowledge from experience. Unlike Descartes view that man could have innate ideas, in Lockes system knowledge consists of ideas imprinted on the mind through observation of external objects and reflection on the evidence provided by the senses. Moral values, Locke held, are derived from sensations of pleasure or pain, the mind labeling good what experience shows to give pleasure. There are no innate ideas; there is no innate depravity.

Though he suggested that souls were born without the idea of God, Locke did not reject Christianity. Sensationalism, he held, was a God-given principle that, properly followed, would lead to conduct that was ethically sound. He had, however, opened a way to disciples who proceeded to conclusions that might have been far from the masters mind. One such was the Irish bishop George Berkeley who affirmed, in his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), that there was no proof that matter existed beyond the idea of it in the mind. Most philosophers after Descartes decided the question of the dualism of mind and matter by adopting a materialist position; whereas they eliminated mind, Berkeley eliminated matterand he was therefore neglected. Locke was perhaps more scientific and certainly more in tune with the intellectual and practical concerns of the age. Voltaire presented Locke as the advocate of rational faith and of sensationalist psychology; Lockes posthumous success was assured. In the debate over moral values, Locke provided a new argument for toleration. Beliefs, like other human differences, were largely the product of environment. Did it not therefore follow that moral improvement should be the responsibility of society? Finally, since human irrationality was the consequence of false ideas, instilled by faulty schooling, should not education be a prime concern of rulers? To pose those questions is to anticipate the agenda of the Enlightenment.

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