The Roots of Enlightenment

"The Empire of Reason," the distinguished American historian Henry Steele Commager calls the Enlightenment. The French called it the "L'Age des Lumieres," meaning the age of "Light"- understanding, discovery, and insight - a period of legendary thinkers. The period might very well be entitled the Age of Research because people "re-searched" the great questions about the nature of the human-animal, society, and cosmos. Another name might be "The Age of Titans." The works of such representatives of the Enlightenment as Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, Diderot, d'Alembert, d'Holbach, Condorct, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condillac, Turgot, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, George Berkeley, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Johann von Herder, and Gottfried Leibniz recall the gift of the last of the Titans, Prometheus the Firebringer. It is from this Enlightened crucible that Atheism would emerge as a modern system of thought. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that swept through the West in the eighteenth century, accelerating by 1750 and cresting in Europe at the time of the French Revolution and somewhat later for the United States. The Enlightenment was strong in England, Holland, Scotland, the United States, and especially in France where it was more organized than elsewhere. The Enlightenment was a loose association of Atheists, deists, and liberal clerics; it was not a school or group which required a person to accept certain tenets. This book briefly discusses the French philosophes, the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.