Initially limited to a small handful of scholars, the ideas of the Scientific Revolution spread to a wider European public during the eighteenth century. That process was aided by novel techniques of printing and bookmaking, by a popular press, by growing literacy, and by a host of scientific societies. Moreover, the new approach to knowledge — rooted in human reason, skeptical of authority, expressed in natural laws — was now applied to human affairs, not just to the physical universe. The Scottish professor Adam Smith (1723–1790), for example, formulated laws that accounted for the operation of the economy and that, if followed, he believed, would generate inevitably favorable results for society. Growing numbers of people believed that the long-term outcome of scientific development would be “enlightenment,” a term that has come to define the eighteenth century in European history. If human reason could discover the laws that governed the universe, surely it could uncover ways in which humankind might govern itself more effectively.

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“What is Enlightenment?” asked the prominent German intellectual Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). “It is man’s emergence from his self-imposed … inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance…. Dare to know! ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”27 Although they often disagreed sharply with one another, European Enlightenment thinkers shared this belief in the power of knowledge to transform human society. They also shared a satirical, critical style, a commitment to open-mindedness and inquiry, and in various degrees a hostility to established political and religious authority. Many took aim at arbitrary governments, the “divine right of kings,” and the aristocratic privileges of European society. The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) offered principles for constructing a constitutional government, a contract between rulers and ruled that was created by human ingenuity rather than divinely prescribed. Much of Enlightenment thinking was directed against the superstition, ignorance, and corruption of established religion. In his Treatise on Toleration, the French writer Voltaire (1694–1778) reflected the outlook of the Scientific Revolution as he commented sarcastically on religious intolerance:

This little globe, nothing more than a point, rolls in space like so many other globes; we are lost in its immensity. Man, some five feet tall, is surely a very small part of the universe. One of these imperceptible beings says to some of his neighbors in Arabia or Africa: “Listen to me, for the God of all these worlds has enlightened me; there are nine hundred million little ants like us on the earth, but only my anthill is beloved of God; He will hold all others in horror through all eternity; only mine will be blessed, the others will be eternally wretched.”28

Voltaire’s own faith, like that of many others among the “enlightened,” was deism. Deists believed in a rather abstract and remote Deity, sometimes compared to a clockmaker, who had created the world, but not in a personal God who intervened in history or tampered with natural law. Others became pantheists, who believed that God and nature were identical. Here was a conception of religion shaped by the outlook of science. Sometimes called “natural religion,” it was devoid of mystery, revelation, ritual, and spiritual practice, while proclaiming a God that could be “proven” by human rationality, logic, and the techniques of scientific inquiry. In this view, all else was superstition. Among the most radical of such thinkers were the several Dutchmen who wrote the Treatise of Three Imposters, which claimed that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were fraudulent impostors who based their teachings on “the ignorance of Peoples [and] resolved to keep them in it.”29

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Prominent among the debates spawned by the Enlightenment was the question of women’s nature, their role in society, and the education most appropriate for them. Although well-to-do Parisian women hosted in their elegant salons many gatherings of the largely male Enlightenment figures, most of those men were anything but ardent feminists. The male editors of the famous Encyclopédie, a vast compendium of Enlightenment thought, included very few essays by women. One of the male authors expressed a common view: “[Women] constitute the principal ornament of the world…. May they, through submissive discretion and … artless cleverness, spur us [men] on to virtue.” In his treatise Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described women as fundamentally different from and inferior to men and urged that “the whole education of women ought to be relative to men.”

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Such views were sharply contested by any number of other Enlightenment figures — men and women alike. The Journal des Dames (Ladies Journal), founded in Paris in 1759, aggressively defended women. “If we have not been raised up in the sciences as you have,” declared Madame Beaulmer, the Journal’s first editor, “it is you [men] who are the guilty ones; for have you not always abused … the bodily strength that nature has given you?”30 The philosopher Condorcet looked forward to the “complete destruction of those prejudices that have established an inequality of rights between the sexes.” And in 1792, the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft directly confronted Rousseau’s view of women and their education: “What nonsense! … Til women are more rationally educated, the progress of human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.” Thus was initiated a debate that echoed throughout the centuries that followed.

Though solidly rooted in Europe, Enlightenment thought was influenced by the growing global awareness of its major thinkers. Voltaire, for example, idealized China as an empire governed by an elite of secular scholars selected for their talent, which stood in sharp contrast to continental Europe, where aristocratic birth and military prowess were far more important. The example of Confucianism — supposedly secular, moral, rational, and tolerant — encouraged Enlightenment thinkers to imagine a future for European civilization without the kind of supernatural religion that they found so offensive in the Christian West.

The central theme of the Enlightenment — and what made it potentially revolutionary — was the idea of progress. Human society was not fixed by tradition or divine command but could be changed, and improved, by human action guided by reason. No one expressed this soaring confidence in human possibility more clearly than the French thinker the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who boldly declared that “the perfectibility of humanity is indefinite.” Belief in progress was a sharp departure from much of premodern social thinking, and it inspired those who later made the great revolutions of the modern era in the Americas, France, Russia, China, and elsewhere. Born of the Scientific Revolution, that was the faith of the Enlightenment. For some, it was virtually a new religion.

The age of the Enlightenment, however, also witnessed a reaction against too much reliance on human reason. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) minimized the importance of book learning for the education of children and prescribed instead an immersion in nature, which taught self-reliance and generosity rather than the greed and envy fostered by “civilization.” The Romantic movement in art and literature appealed to emotion, intuition, passion, and imagination rather than cold reason and scientific learning. Religious awakenings — complete with fiery sermons, public repentance, and intense personal experience of sin and redemption — shook Protestant Europe and North America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Methodist movement — with its emphasis on Bible study, confession of sins, fasting, enthusiastic preaching, and resistance to worldly pleasures — was a case in point.

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Various forms of “enlightened religion” also arose in the early modern centuries, reflecting the influence of Enlightenment thinking. Quakers, for example, emphasized tolerance, an absence of hierarchy and ostentation, a benevolent God, and an “inner light” available to all people. Unitarians denied the Trinity, original sin, predestination, and the divinity of Jesus, but honored him as a great teacher and a moral prophet. Later, in the nineteenth century, proponents of the “social gospel” saw the essence of Christianity not in personal salvation but in ethical behavior. Science and the Enlightenment surely challenged religion, and for some they eroded religious belief and practice. Just as surely, though, religion persisted, adapted, and revived for many others.