64 Enlightenment Around the World
6.3 THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE GREAT AWAKENING
6.3 THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE GREAT AWAKENING
To understand the Enlightenment and fully appreciate its significance, we must review the state of the western world before the Scientific Revolution. Today most people believe the earth is a round planet orbiting in a solar system around a star known as the sun. We tend to accept this view without question. In the 1400s, people’s view of the world differed from ours. For most of that century, many Europeans believed the earth might be flat and that all the planets and stars and even the sun revolved around it. The centrality of the earth to the universe was a religious as much as a scientific concept for many, while the flat earth concept had existed since ancient times.
The ancient astronomer Ptolemy’s geocentric theory, that Earth was the center of the universe, remained accepted as fact over 1,200 years after his death. Nicolaus Copernicus, whose varied interests in theology, medicine, law, language, mathematics, and especially astronomy marked him as a true Renaissance man, observed the heavens and studied Ptolemy’s theories. Believing Ptolemy wrong, Copernicus took what he knew to be fact and developed a heliocentric theory where the sun and not the earth was at the center of the universe. Copernicus appears to have conceived his basic model before 1514 and spent the rest of his life developing his theory, which was published shortly before his death in 1543. His work, On the Revolutions, touched off the Scientific Revolution which continued well into the seventeenth century.
Among all the great figures of the Scientific Revolution, Sir Isaac Newton most importantly distilled the theories and discoveries of the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to himself. His greatest work, Philosphia Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, presented a reasonable, understandable, and demonstrable model for the workings of the universe, which was based on science and excluded theology. Newton’s concepts, such as his Law of Gravity, gave a predictable and comprehensible framework from which to view the world and beyond.
6.3.1 The Enlightenment
The ideas of the Scientific Revolution inspired people in many fields besides science. With Newton demonstrating rational explanations for the functions of the universe, philosophers were inspired to re-think humanity and its place in the universe. The Scientific Revolution, then, was at the root of the Enlightenment.
With the Enlightenment came a new spirit of thought and intellectual investigation. Old ideas and theories could be questioned and new ones proposed on virtually any subject. Acceptance of what had always been was no longer sufficient support for belief; instead, understanding with reasoned explanations and arguments were needed. Of the many great thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hume, the one whose works on politics and philosophy ha