Beginning in the sixteenth century, western Europe saw its religion-based notions of the natural and social worlds countered by arguments grounded in reason and observation. Leaders of the Scientific Revolution (ca. 1540–1690) drew on earlier European, Greek, and Arab insights to support their theories and to challenge the church-dominated wisdom of the time. Advances in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and other fields were supported and promoted by the huge profits and increasing technological demands of growing European trade. Intellectuals in Europe and the United States next turned a critical eye toward society and politics. Those active in the period known as the Enlightenment, which stretched from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, insisted on rational approaches to human relations, drawing on scientific arguments and existing critiques of organized religion in their calls for the reform of societies and governments.