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find a basis for morality independent of religion gains strength. In England and France societies are organized for the improvement of morals and manners; in the universities the elegance of Cicero and Seneca drives out the old scholasticism; and theological narrowness is combated by the spirit of universalism in the Neo-Stoic teachings of Justus Lipaius (d. 1606), who influenced Grotius, Descartes and Spinoza. The spirit of Humanism and the Renaissance thus persisted in the jurists and the philosophers of France and Holland.

In all these phases of the Enlightenment there appears, as yet, no conscious, thorough hostility to a theology restricted to its own field, but the desire rather to emancipate other branches of human interest from its away. Only gradually does a really independent method of thought arise, conditioned largely by the epistemological and moral theories of Stoicism. The theory of natural law first established its independence; natural religion and natural morality achieved their freedom with greater difficulty. Yet natural religion, in essence, was taught by theology itself and needed but the refutation of the doctrines of hereditary sin and the invalidity of the human intellect in order to gain the overhand over a revelation. Lord Herbert of Cherbury accomplished this in 1624 in his De verizate religiottis. Natural morality was freed from theology through the separation of the lax natures from the lez diving and sanction for it in the human reason was established by Francis Bacon (q.v.; d. 1626) and the French skeptics, especially by Charron in his Sagesse (1605). Bayle (d. 1705; Bee BAYLE, PIERRE) contrasted the universality of the moral instinct with the diversity and conflict between historical creeds. In these different ways Western Europe, in the seventeenth century, strove toward the attainment of an autonomous organon that should constitute a simple and unvarying norm for the guidance of the judgment on the matter of conflicting faiths and moral dogmas.

On the evolution of such a method of thought a profound influence was exercised by the natural sciences and the method which they employed. Two forces are discernible in this development-

(1) the impetus toward induction 5. The Hew supplied by Bacon and, more than

Knowledge. this, (2) the progress in mathematics and mechanics following the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus (d. 1543), Kepler (d. 1673), and Galileo (d. 164.2). The new knowledge united to the atomism of Gasaendi (d. 1655) established induction on a firm basis and found fullest expression in Newton (d. 1727), Huyghene (d. 1695) and Laplace (d. 1827). The laws of gravitation and inertia were both the basis and the impulse to extensive investigation in the various phases of the physical world. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the centuries of the great physicists and mathematicians, and on the principles they outlined arse the sciences of optics, acoustics, chemistry, zoology, geology, physiology, and medicine. The influence of the new sciences was enormous. They destroyed the foundations of revelation and theology, and led to

the rise of new philosophic systems aiming at the interpretation and correlation of the results attained by the various sciences, the methods of which were mathematical, marked primarily by clearness of statement and preciseness of definition. The new scientific method entered even the fields of natural law, natural religion, and natural morality. Locks and Condillac made psychology the study of the laws of motion among psychic elements, and Quesnay interpreted social laws after the manner of laws of nature. Voltaire became the apostle of Newton and in France particularly the new sciences were perfected and disseminated. Nor were these in the beginning hostile to religion. The new knowledge showed itself capable of various interpretations. It was found consistent with deism by Locks and Voltaire, with ancient pantheism by Shaftesbury, with mystic pantheism by Spinoza, with spiritualism by Descartes, with theism by Leibnitz, and with materialism by the Encyclopediets (q.v.). Yet the whole aspect of the world of thought was changed. Miracles became impossible, except to the casuist; the earth was removed from its central position in the universe and became only a point in apace; anthropocentrism was destroyed. The spirit of the eighteenth century assumed its characteristic qualities; it became atomistic, analytic, mechanical, practical; entirely on the aide of the known and the evident, entirely opposed to all that was dark, mystic or fantastic.

Second only in importance to the mathematical sciences was the development of a new historical method, universal, secular, and philosophic, as opposed to the theological and antiquarian 6. The New historiography that came before. The