12.4 The Enlightenment

During the Scientific Revolution of the 1500s and 1600s, European scholars made advances in physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Like ancient scholars, the thinkers of the Scientific Revolution relied on reason, but they also developed a new “scientific method” to test their theories and observations. Using mathematics and the scientific method, they discovered a series of laws that governed the physical universe.

Sir Isaac Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. Among his many discoveries was gravity.

Objectives

• Describe how science led to the Enlightenment.
• Explain the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.
• Summarize the economic ideas of the physiocrats and Adam Smith.
• Describe how Enlightenment ideas spread and influenced the arts.
• Understand the role of enlightened despots.

Key Terms

• natural law
• Thomas Hobbes
• John Locke
• social contract
• natural rights
• philosophe
• Montesquieu
• Voltaire
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• laissez faire
• Adam Smith
• free market
• free enterprise system
• censorship
• salon
• baroque
• rococo
• enlightened despot
• Joseph II

Scientific Revolution Leads to the Enlightenment

The Scientific Revolution, in turn, helped spark the Enlightenment in which thinkers emphasized the use of reason to uncover “natural” laws that governed human life. During the Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s, thinkers developed new ideas about government and basic human rights.

While scientists and mathematicians developed laws about natural phenomena like the law of gravity, European thinkers searched for similar laws that governed human life. Like scientists, they emphasized the power of reason, rather than religious beliefs. During the 1600s and 1700s, these thinkers developed new ideas about natural laws—unchanging principles, discovered through reason, that govern all human conduct.

Using the methods of the Scientific Revolution, European thinkers and reformers set out to study human behavior and solve the problems of society. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant used the word enlightenment to describe this new approach. During the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, philosophers emphasized the power of human reason to uncover general laws of nature that shape all of human experience.

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