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Enlightenment THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG 144

1810). If the age of the Enlightenment be called an unhistorical age, it is so only in the sense that it cultivated history not so much as an end in itself as for the purpose of obtaining support for its political and moral theories. And the influence of its investigations was enormous. They destroyed the idea of a history of the world based on Daniel, the Apocalypse, and St. Augustine, opened up vast realms of time, rejected the fall of man as the cardinal point in universal evolution, and created a new type of primitive man. Above all, it introduced a method analogous to the analytical and mechanical method of the natural sciences. It dealt with the individual as the historical unit, as a result of whose conscious, purposive actions social structures arise. And as the enormous diversity of human motive and impulse thus revealed necessitated the establishment of some norm for a unified interpretation of history, such a one was found in natural law, religion, and morality; and all deviations from the norm were ascribed to evil or cunning, to tyranny or priestly hypocrisy, to stupidity or ignorance. And thus historiography, because it had caught the spirit of the Enlightenment, became a powerful instrument for the dissemination of that spirit, though in the first place works may have been written with purposes deistic or materialistic, theological or anticlerical, skeptical or optimistic.

A new philosophy, opposed both to the Arie totelianism of the Church and to the rehabilitation of ancient philosophic systems, now assumes to outline the fundamental principles of scientific thought in the theoretical and practical disciplines. Abandoning the old belief in the Fall and the con sequent degeneration of the human intellect, it grounded itself on the capacities of

7. Philoso- the human mind and dared to be as phy of the creative in basic principles as the new

Period. sciences had been in their respective fields. Philosophy was no longer the handmaid of theology, but ruled an independent realm. The creation of a new philosophy was the work of the great minds of the seventeenth century; its consequences partly destroyed theology and partly transformed it. These consequences were developed in the eighteenth century by the less original thinkers and litt6rateurs; for though the great men of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, belonged in part to the Enlighten ment, their original work first bore fruit in the nine teenth. Yet the influence exercised by the great philosophers on the history of philosophy is dif ferent from that they exerted on the history of the Enlightenment. Their essentially philosophic problems were too abstruse and subtle to affect greatly a popular movement, and it was rather their secondary contributions that furthered the progress of the Enlightenment. Thus Spinoza and Malebranche exercised practically no influence at all; the influence exercised by Hobbes and Leib nitz was indirect; while that of Shaftesbury and others was only partial. Of greater importance, after Descartes, was the work of Bayle, Locks, Wolff, Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists. Service

was also rendered by the Deists who directed their criticism against positive religion, and the ethical writers who sought in the new philosophy a basis for natural morality. There came finally the real philosophers of the Enlightenment, the eclectics and popularizers, the exponents of common sense and natural law, whose philosophical importance is small indeed, but whose historical influence was great.

Nevertheless the philosophy of the Enlightenment, in the last analysis, may be traced back to the great philosophic systems. (1) Cartesianism applied the mechanical method to the study of the physical world and the axiomatic process of mathematics to the spiritual. It found ontologic unity in a God who combined in himself physical substance and soul substance. It abandoned everything that was not clear or demonstrable. (2) The sensualism of Hobbes and Locks broke more abruptly with the old metaphysics by discarding self-evident truths and innate ideas and founding all knowledge on the experience of the senses, and its recasting in the soul; yet they found the idea of God necessary for the working of their world machine. From them proceeded the phyaicotheological arguments for the wisdom and the goodness of an architectonic deity and the treatment of morality on the basis of an empirical psychology which attained to the greatest importance. (3) In reaction against sensualism, Leibnitz, by a method analogous to that of Descartes, established a mechanical world of bodies and a dynamic world of spirits, transforming the old ontology of substances into one of monads. (4) Materialism carried the tenets of sensualism to the extreme by denying the existence of the soul and combating the physicotheological arguments for the existence of God. In Hume and Kant, it is true, the materialism of the new natural philosophy brought forth profound epistemological theories, but the natural sciences on the whole rendered greater services to the revolutionary thought, which attempted, on the basis of the observation of nature and certain elementary data of psychology empirically derived, to create a new metaphysical and ethical system, destined to constitute the precondition for a complete reconstruction of society. Yet to all these contrasting or opposed systems there were common the spirit of antagonism to the theological method, the miraculous and the exceptional, and an undoubting confidence in the power of the intellect to attain knowledge and in power of will to apply it. Especially in the field of ethics the independence of the human conscience was upheld against all supernatural authority, against all revealed systems of sanctions, rewards, and punishments.

It was literature, however, and not philosophy, that really insured the triumph of the Enlightenment. The great fact here to be recognized is the cooperation of three forces, a rising bourgeoisie, a growing independence of thought, and the highly developed literatures of England and France. It was literature that finally overthrew theology and created the vocabulary, the battle-cries and the very name of the Enlightenment. Holland was the first home of the militant literature of the age.