"The Enlightenment"

"The Enlightenment" has been used as a name for a historical period of a certain enlightenment, which was not uniform and which did not also put out some lights. The Roman Catholic setting up of the university system was itself an enlightenment, e.g.One iconic emblem of the Enlightenment was the great French Encyclopédie, which appeared over the course of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Scholarly experts in this field are forever tinkering with dates. Harold Nicolson is probably right in his elegant study The Age of Reason in saying that it would be unwise to seek some spurious chronological precision, though he himself points to two great intellectual landmarks that might suggest a beginning.These are Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In very general terms these enormously influential books mark a decisive shift in the way thinkers regarded the natural world around them, and the waythey thought about thinking itself. What they proposed between them was no small innovation. It would after all be difficult to find a sphere larger than that of the human mind and all possible objects of its attention. I came up with the pseudo-terminal date of 1815, the year of Waterloo, myself. I am not alone in regarding Napoleon Bonaparte as at the very least an implication of Enlightenment. Among the most famous and ghoulish of the etchings in Goya’s Los caprichos is the one entitled El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. This is usually translated The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters. So also and in another sense, as I hope to suggest in this book, did the Dream of Reason.
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History; Enlightenment; The History of Science; Revelation
Category:History