The Enlightenment
&
The Modern World
View
By Robin Phillips
Introduction
It is reported that William
Temple, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, once asked his father,
who was then the Archbishop, “Daddy, why don’t the philosophers rule the
world?” His father looked down at the boy and replied, “Of course they do,
silly – two hundred years after they’re dead!”
The more I study history, the more convinced I become
that William
Temple’s father had a point. In fact, I would state the matter in even stronger
terms: there has never been a more powerful influence, a
greater agency of change or a stronger force for good or ill in this world as
that of human ideas.
Such a statement may seem out of place in a culture that
has long since relegated philosophy to a specialists’ discipline - one which is
thought to have little or no relevance to the world of every day affairs.
Indeed, in many people’s minds, philosophy is associated with dry and dusty
academics who have nothing better to do than to waste their time on
speculations about whether they really exist. Even when our thinking is not
dominated by such caricatures, it is certainly true that we have come a long way from the time when
philosophy was thought to be the backbone of all the disciplines, including the
sciences (indeed, the early scienctists called themselves “Natural
Philosophers”)
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that philosophy
is still the backbone to everything, even though it is not recognized as
such. Let us suppose that the whole shape of Western society is based on
certain unconscious philosophical assumptions about life, mankind and the
world? Furthermore, could it be that everything about our lives, from the way
think of ourselves to who we vote for to how we view sex, is based on certain
unconscious philosophical assumptions that, because they are unnoticed, go
unexamined and unchallenged?
Of
course, if this is how things stand, if we are being ‘ruled’, so to speak, by
philosophers from the past without even realizing it, then we will want to
ferret out these unconscious influences and examine them in the broad light of
day. We will want to consider whether the ideas that exert such powerful
influences on us and our culture are true ideas.
That is
the reason I have written this and the following essay. In studying certain
aspects of our society, I have become convinced that we are the unconscious
recipients of a philosophical movement that emerged three hundred years ago.
The movement to which I refer is that to which history has given the name “the
Enlightenment.” Though much time has elasped since this period of, so called,
enlightenment, and though much of the thinking which dominated that time of
history may seem archaic to the postmodern mind, nevertheless the Enlightenment
period exercized such a lasting influence on Western culture that the matter can
hardly be overstated. In fact, there is a sense in which the Enlightenment is
more of a reality today than it was during the actual period of the 18th
century. During the Enlightenment period, the philosophical revolution was
comparitively intellectual; three hundred years later and this philosophy is
not something we so much think about, but something that we live out in almost
every aspect of our society. Even postmodernism, which in many ways has
superceeded the modernism of the Enlightenment, could never have come about but
for it’s Enlightenment pedigree.
In this
essay, I shall be showing what was the foundation of the Enlightenment’s
revolutionary philosophy. In further essay, I shall attempt to show how our
society is unconsciously ‘ruled’ by the Enlightenment in some important practical
areas.
History has
designated the 18th century as “the age of Enlightenment.” It was
during this period that Western man is supposed to have been finally enlightened
concerning the true nature of the world he inhabits. This was the period when
reason, liberated from the constricting influences of dogmatic faith, was
supposedly set free to scrutinize the universe with unprecedented courage and
acuity.
It was during this period
that the foundations for the modern world view were forged. Whereas previously
Western man had generally viewed the universe theocentrically (oriented around
God), it now began to view the universe egocentrically (oriented around man).
Whereas previously the universe was understood and explained through reference
to God, during the Enlightenment the universe began to be understood in purely
materialistic terms.
Materialism and Determinism
Materialism
in the philosophical sense does not refer to greedy consumerism. Rather, it
refers to the view that “all entities and processes are composed of – or are
reducible to – matter, material forces or physical processes. …materialism
entails the denial of the reality of spiritual beings, consciousness and mental
or psychic states or processes, as ontologically distinct from, or independent
of, material changes or processes.”[1]
That, at least, is how the dictionary defines materialism. Put more simply, the
universe of the materialist is one in which everything, including you and me,
is reduced to physics and chemistry. Not surprisingly, materialism is usually
associated with atheism and agnosticism.
Before proceeding there is
another term that needs defining: determinism. Determinism is connected with materialism
because it is the logical result of the latter. Determinism is the view that
everything, including man’s actions, are pre-determined by physical forces.
Determinists believe that free will, in the ordinary sense at least, is an
illusion, for in everything we do it is never true that we could have
done otherwise.
This deterministic way of
viewing of the universe was reflected in Diderot’s “skeptic’s
prayer.” After spending an entire book looking squarely at the consequences of
the materialist worldview, he closes with the following prayer:
O God,
I do not know if you exist….I ask nothing in this world, for the course of
events is determined by its own necessity if you do not exist, or by your
decree if you do…. Here I stand, as I am, a necessarily organized part of
eternal and necessary matter – or perhaps your own creation….[2]
So how did these ideas of
materialism and determinism come to be accepted during the Enlightenment? To
answer that question, we have to backtrack into the 17th century.
While the 17th century held many thinkers and writers whose work
contributed to the Enlightenment, we shall be looking at only three figures
whose ideas were particularly relevant in the establishment of determinism.
One doesn’t have to read far in the literature of the
Enlightenment to see one name esteemed above all others. Voltaire called him
“the greatest man who ever lived.”
The man was Isaac Newton
(1642-1727), the great scientist who is perhaps best known for discovering the
law of gravity. Newton’s work was extremely influential during the
Enlightenment, especially where the philosophies of materialism and determinism
were concerned.
Before Newton many
scientists had made inroads towards the goal of understanding the laws by which
the universe was ordered. Galileo had shown the laws of terrestrial motion;
Kepler had shown the laws of planetary motion while Descartes’ had showed that
the universe operated mechanistically. What made Newton stand out above his
precursors, however, was the way he effectively integrated all previous
knowledge into a single, comprehensive theory.
Newton’s discoveries about
the laws of motion allowed people to take a state-description of any system and
work out from that description what the future state-descriptions would be and
what the past state-descriptions had been. The same descriptions that held true
of the universe also held true of the trajectory of a ping pong ball and
falling apples. If the position and momentum of every point-particle is given,
then a system can be completely described in mechanistic terms. Applied to the
universe as a whole, this meant that the universe was rational, intelligible,
and operated like a great machine in constant obedience to the laws God had
created. Hence, Newton’s joyful exclamation, “O God, I think thy thoughts after
thee!” Referring to Newton, Lucas writes,
He gives us a ‘God’s eye’
view of the universe, in which the whole of space at any one time is present
immediately to God, who knows all the atoms individually, as it were by name,
and knows where they are and what they are doing…. Newton views the world
bathed in Absolute light, or better, illuminated by Absolute omniscience, a
world of Absolute things in Absolute space, at one particular instant of
Absolute time, all immediately present in God’s consciousness, as it were in
His sensorium.[3]
With
God playing such an important part in Newton’s thinking, it may seem strange
that I suggested earlier that his ideas played a central role in the
development of a materialistic worldview. Before looking at that, however, it
is important to understand the basic distinction between a materialistic
universe and a mechanistic one. Newton showed that the universe was
‘mechanical’ in the sense that nature had fixed laws and operated like a big
machine. The important thing to realize is that although Newton described the
universe in mechanistic terms, he did not describe the universe in materialistic
terms. He never believed that his discoveries rendered God unnecessary nor
did he advocate determinism. Although Newton showed the ways in which nature’s
patterns were determined by nature’s laws, one cannot call this determinism
since Newton never applied this to man himself. Newton’s laws of motion might
describe the trajectory of a man being fired from a catapult, but not the same
man walking round his garden. Above all, such laws cannot explain our thoughts
and decisions.
Newton’s discoveries,
properly understood, always pointed towards the Creative intelligence behind
everything. This elevated man who was made in God’s image and could discover
the universe’s laws while being more than merely the product of physics.
Speaking again of Newton’s ideas Lucas writes as follows:
…God, the Creator, is
Himself uncreate, and not part of the created world. Newton, taking the God’s
eye view, always considers the world from outside. He could thus embrace
materialism and mechanistic determinism as completely true, because not true of
completely everything – oneself, and every thing to do with oneself, was always
excepted. Like God, the thinker was not himself subject to the laws he laid
down as obeyed by everything else; and awkward problems were thereby avoided. [4]
How
then did Newton’s physics become associated with a materialistic view of the
universe? The process began with John Locke (1632-1704), a
contemporary and friend of Newton, who was also an important precursor of the
Enlightenment. Now Locke was a determinist, for he believed that human beings,
as well as the universe, are completely governed by deterministic forces. The
principles that Newton saw as applying only to the material world Locke sees as
applying to mankind. Locke believed that a complete description of the
world (and that includes everything, including your and my actions) can be
arrived at from mechanical state-descriptions. Thus, if we had enough
information, then theoretically the future of the universe could be predicted
in every respect, not just in some respects.
Such determinism
even applies to our own thoughts. Hume, building on Locke’s theory in the 18th
century, wrote about the involuntary association of
ideas which our experience has connected together. “All these operations are a
species of natural instincts which no reasoning or process of thought and
understanding is able either to produce or to prevent.”[5]
Locke,
like other philosophers of the 17th century, had been careful to try
to fit his ideas into a Christian framework. Locke even wrote a book defending
the reasonableness of Christianity. However, this mattered little to the next
generation who was prepared to be more consistent with the consequence of his
philosophy. In proposing a theory that reduced man to matter, Locke’s
philosophy became one of the foundation stones of the Enlightenment’s attack on
revealed religion.
Spinoza
Another
17th century determinist, whose writings would influence the
Enlightenment, was Benedict De Spinoza (1632-77). As with Locke, we again find
the strange conjunction of materialism and theism. Spinoza’s theism consisted in
a God who “[existed] in only a philosophical sense…" This “philosophical
God” of Spinoza’s system was not distinct from His creation, but identified
with nature. As he wrote, “Whatever is, is in God…” Depending on how you look
at it, either nature is being deified or God is being naturalized, but either
way Spinoza’s unusual kind of theism was only semantically different from later
atheism. Since nature, under Spinoza’s nuance, refers to the necessary rational
order of all things, it followed that there can be nothing apart from “that
eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature…”
Of
course, this led Spinoza to advocate determinism. “All things,” he wrote, “have
necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same
way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity,
that its three angles are equal to two right angles." Human actions,
thoughts, emotions, no less than God Himself, must be explicable in terms of
the universal and necessary laws of this all-inclusive “Nature.” Thus, speaking
of the human being, he expressed his desire to “consider human actions and
appetites, just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies."
Emotions, whether love, anger, hate, envy, pride, jealousy, etc., “follow from
the same necessity and force of nature as the other singular things…"
In the
next section we shall explore the effect that this materialistic philosophy had
on religious belief.
Materialism
Marginalizes God
As
we move on into the 18th century - the period known as the
Enlightenment – we find the twin ideologies of
determinism and materialism starting to grip the European intellegencia. The
ideas which, in the 17th century, were primarily confined to dry and
dusty acadamics, began to filter down to the populace. In fact, the figures we
normally associate with the Enlightenment - people like Voltaire, Diderot,
Rousseau – were simply the popularizers, rather than the inventors, of this new
way of looking at things.
The
Problem of a Personal God
The effect of this new way of thinking on religious
belief was dramatic. Since materialism affirmed that it was possible to explain
the universe in purely naturalistic terms, no longer was it necessary for there
to be a personal God behind everything. The idea of a God who is interested in
the affairs of men, a God who gives to man an authoratative revelation or
performs miracles, was dismissed as a by-product of pre-scientific
superstition.
Because the new matrerialism was fundamentally anti-Christian,
it is easy for people to carelessly assume that the proponants of this
philosophy were atheists. This is far from true. In fact, outright atheists
were such a rare comodity in the 18th century that Hume was even
known to remark that he didn’t believe such people existed at all. The
self-appointed task of the 18th century materialists was not to
attack the existence of God but, rather, to attack the foundations of revealed
religion. Once that was taken care of – that is, once it was no longer credible
for a thinking person to believe in such things as authoritative revelation,
miracles and a God interested in the details of our personal lives – these
philosophers prefered to retain some notion of a Supreme Being rather than face
the intellectual difficulties of atheism. As Becker puts it,
It
seemed safer…to retain God, or some plausable substitute, as a kind of
dialectical guarantee that all was well in the most comfortable of commonsense worlds. But,
obviously, the Creator as a mere first premise no longer needed those rich and
all too human qualities of God the Father. Having performed his essential
function of creation, it was proper for him to withdraw from the affairs of men
into the shadowy places where absolute being dwells. Thus withdrawn, he ceased
to be personal and inconvenient.[6]
This
‘Supreme Being’ was called by a variety of names, including First Cause,
Supreme Architect, Author of the Universe, or even Benvolent Entity. As long as
this Being was unknowable, irrelevent and uninvolved, the philosophers were
happy.
One
way of showing that this Supreme Being was irrelevant and non-personal was to
show that the universe, and particularly man, was the impersonal result of
matter and necessity. If man is not made in the image of God but merely a system
of pre-determined physical particulars, then even if you want to say that God
started the ball rolling at the beginning, the overall conclusion remains
crystal clear: God has nothing to do with our lives and, if He exists at all,
is completely irrelevant to the closed pre-determined system in which we are
trapped.
Newtonian Philosophy?
One
of the most fascinating, but equally infuriating, aspects of this new
materialism was the way it used, or rather, misused, Newtonian science
to bolster its agenda. Newton’s discoveries, filtered through the philosophy of
Locke and then popularised by Enlightenment polemicists, gave impetus to this
new way of looking at the universe.
Becker
notes the names of six different 18th century books that popularized
“Newtonian philosophy”, as it came to be called. The emalgamation of Newton’s
discoveries into a ‘philosophy’ is significance. What was this new philosophy?
It was certainly not that for every action there is an equal and oposite
reaction. In fact, if you wanted to learn the principles of Newtonian
‘philosophy’, the last place you would want to turn would be to Newton’s own
writings. Better turn to such books as Martin’s A Plain and Familiar
Introduction to the Newtonian Philosophy (1971) or, better still, Voltaire’s
Elements of Newtonian Philosophy (1738).
Though Voltaire’s book on Newton made clear that “The
whole philosophy of Newton leads of necessity to the knowledge of a Supreme
Being”[7],
the overall thrust of the, so called, ‘Newtonian philosophy’ was towards an
impersonal and materialistic way of viewing things. Anyone who wanted to could
start with the premise that the universe was governed by a set of rational laws
and then leap to the conclusion that the universe and its laws were all there
was, or at least, all that can be known. Similarly, one could start from the
premise that the universe followed determined laws and then leap to the premise
that man’s decisions were likewise pre-determined - that the human being is
really no different from lines, planes, and bodies. In taking these leaps from
the mechanistic universe of Newton to the materialistic universe of the
Enlightenment agnostics, you could feel that science was entirely on your side.
Furthermore, since Newton’s discoveries were thought to have
banished mystery from the world[8]
by showing that everything was rationally explicable on a purely empirical
basis, it was again an easy step for those who wished to dismiss all aspects of
the unseen world that had been central to Christian dogma.
Of course,
things were not so clear cut as I have made out. The new philosophy was not
nearly so monolythic as my brief discussion implies while the relationship
between Newtonian physics and this new philosophy was actually extremely vague.
It was vague because the new philosophy became popular, not because people
habitually worked them out from a systematized train of thought, but because of
an incholate notion that such ideas were somehow implicated by the advances in
science.[9]
This vagueness was increased by the fact that the popularizers of the new
philosophy were mainly polemicists rather than philosophy professors who, as
such, tended to speak in induindo and suggestion. (There were also important
political reasons for this rhetorical approach, with the eye of the
state-appointed censor always luming large.) As we know from observing the
politicians of our own time, one can pass off a lot of illogic when the
conclusion is never directly stated but everywhere apparent.
In the
next section we shall be looking at a curious effect of this new philosophy. As
the role of God became marginalized, we find the concept of Nature being
invested with a curious nuance and rising to fill the vacuum.
The
Quest for Nature
It is ironic
that the very movement which reduced the nature of man and his universe to an
impersonal chain of cause and effect, should begin to exalt nature to the
status almost of deification. Having convinced themselves that there was
nothing to deify in the metaphysical realm, the 18th century
humanists began implicitly to deify the physical realm. However, this is no
more ironic than the fact that those who convinced themselves that they were
nothing more than the product of impersonal causes and effects, if not a
complete accident of time plus chance, should exalt the name of man and be
remembered today as ‘humanists.’
Perhaps it is
not so very ironic after all. Man cannot deny the instincts of his make-up and
will have his gods; he will perform his sacred rites. If he finds nothing to
worship, then he deifies Man in the collective or, perhaps, the human spirit,
if he can momentarily forget that he does not believe in spirits.
So it was in 18th
century that Nature became the resident god. In parody of the rejected Bible,
it began to become customary to refer to ‘the book of Nature.’ Rather than
turning to the words of the apostles and prophets, you turned to what was
empirically verifiable in “Nature’s book.” Hence, the famous term ‘natural
religion’ that became something of a buzz word during the 18th
century.
Nature soon came to mean more than merely nature. What it
exactly did come to mean would be difficult to say. In studying 18th
century literature, scholars have identified over a hundred uses of the term![10]
Nature became a useful variable which, attached to any idea or course of
action, endowed it with a dignity that was as effective as it was vague. (The
closest parallel I can think of is how the term ‘liberty’ is used in American
discourse.)
Just as
different authors used the concept of nature differently, so the second half of
18th-century saw a shift in how the concept of nature was used. Though it is dangerous to
generalize, one can cautiously say that in the first half of the century nature tended to be
associated with stability, order and symmetry whereas as the century progressed
nature became increasingly associated with disorder, asymmetry and flux.
Nature was also used as a point of epistemological and
moral reference. Those who dispensed with the Christian God and His revelation
were not yet ready to reject any external standard, and ‘nature’ – whatever
that might mean - seemed to offer an alternative centre of orientation. This
was especially felt in the area of ethics.
All philosophers, no matter how
‘enlightened’ they might be, still wished to preserve some basic notions of
morality. Having dispensed with the God of Christianity and His revelation,
they wanted to find another suitable base to sustain ethical imperitives. The
concept of nature seemed to provide just such a base. Hence, ‘nature’ became the new
barometer for determining right and wrong.
In this ethical context, it is very hard to give an
abstract definition for what nature meant. It would be more helpful to look at
specific instances. Though there are a near endless array of examples from 18th
century texts where Nature is used as an ethical yardstick, two citations will
be sufficient to convey the general force, both taken from the famous Encyclopédie.[11]
Speaking on the
subject of political authority, Diderot argued for a contractual view of
government (which affirms that the power of the sovereign is granted only by
the consent of the people, a point Rousseau would later defend in his
controversial book The Social Contract). Diderot writes that “No man has received from nature
the right to command others.... If nature has established any authority,
it is paternal control...”[12]
Similarly, in De Jaucourt’s article “Natural Liberty” he speaks of “A right
which nature gives to all men” to act however they wish – both with themselves and
their possessions - within the boundaries of ‘natural’ law.
As we can see
from these quotations, nature has become somewhat personified (a rather
surprising fact when we consider that this is the same movement that also
reduced nature to depersonalised matter). It is apparently a force, system or
condition that establishes normatives that we ought to heed. Of course, using
nature in this way only begs the question: what is natural and how can
we know what is natural? It is on this point that the 18th century
philosophers tended to be rather mute. And they can hardly be blamed if each
person had a slightly different understanding of what it meant to be natural.
For example, Rousseau understood being “natural” to mean something totally
different - in some cases, opposite – to the outlook advocated by Diderot and
his associates.
For Rousseau,
being ‘natural’ meant returning to more primitive conditions - hence the idea
of the ‘Noble Savage.’ Championing the imperatives of ‘nature’, Rousseau
opposed Diderot and the philosophes by advocating a more intuitive
feeling-based approach. “…consult your own hearts while I speak: that is all I ask.”[13]
It is
significant that, for the most part, Rousseau’s criteria for determining what
is natural was based on his own feelings and what he termed the ‘internal
sentiment.’ In his writings we find most starkly the circularity in which
nearly all the 18th century philosophers were trapped: whatever he
considers to be good must be natural and whatever is natural must be good.
It would be an exaggeration to say that this
religion of nature allowed people to legitimise any action with the
appellation ‘natural.’ Nevertheless, there began to be a slow move in exactly
that direction. As Becker puts it, summarizing Locke’s views,
if
nature be the work of God, and man the product of nature, then all that man
does and thinks, all that he has ever done or thought, must be natural, too,
and in accord with the laws of nature and of nature’s God.[14]
Locke
himself never went so far as to say that everything is natural because
everything is inevitable. However, the followers of Locke had no reservation in
moving from a mechanistic view of man to formulating an entirely mechanistic
theory of moral values. Hence, we find Diderot arguing that since man is a part
of nature, whatever he does is, by definition, ‘natural.’ He implied further
that deformity, whether moral or physical, cannot really be said to be unnatural
since it is purely a matter of human judgement with no objective validity.[15]
To take
the determinist’s premise to its logical consequence does entail that it is
impossible to act unnaturally. In a determinist’s world, everything we do must
be natural because everything we do is the inevitable result of mechanical
forces beyond our control. Hence we
find Voltaire writing, “When I am able to do what I will, I am free; but I will
what I will of necessity…”[16]
Similarly, in a letter to an opponant, Voltaire draws the consistent corollary
of the determinist’s position, namely that whether one loves truth or does
harm, he is acting in accordance with his pre-determined nature:
“I
necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for
condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the playthings of destiny.
Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in
spite of you.”[17]
We thus begin to get a sense for
some of the practical difficulties that began to arise out of the
materialist/determinist philosophical matrix. As time went on, the effects of
this new philosophy began to be felt acutely in a myriad of practical areas. In
next essay, we shall be exploring how this was the case with regard to our sexuality
and understanding of gender.
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[1] Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), p. 535.
[2] From Diderot’s Interprétation de la nature (1754), cited by Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment: An evaluation of its assumptions, attitudes and values (Penguin Books, 1968), p. 95-96.
[3] J. R. Lucas, The Freedom of the Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 105.
[4] Ibid,, p. 105.
[5] Cited by Hampson, op. cit., p. 120.
[6] Carl L Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 49-50.
[7] From the first chapter of Voltaire’s Elements of Newtonian Philosophy, called ‘Of God’, cited by Hampson, op. cit., p. 79.
[8] This is reflected in Pope’s famous epitaph “Nature, and Nature’s
Laws lay hid in Night/God said, Let Newton be! And All was Light.”
[9] The closest parallel today would be the way some
people have a vague (perhaps even unconscious) notion that science
has disproved miracles or that evolution establishes atheism. Ask a person
exactly how the non-existence of God is proved by evolution, or which
scientist disproved miracles in which laboratory, and they hardly know what to
say. This is similar to the general assumption in the 18th century
that an ordered universe removed the need to believe in the supernatural.
[10] As I glance over just a few encyclopaedia entries of Diderot, we find the term being used interchangeably to refer to the sexual drive, common experience, an ethical superstructure, the defining characteristics of a thing, whether human physiology or the composition of a plant or the nature of the gods, the source of innate ideas and the sum total of truth - to name but a few.
[11] The Encyclopédie is
a kind of paradigm of Enlightenment thought. It consists of seventeen volumes,
put together in France under the supervision of Diderot, during the years of
1751 and 1772. This Encyclopédie attempted to catalogue the whole
of human knowledge. It was a noble undertaking with its aim to create “a
universal and rational dictionary…to bring together the knowledge scattered
over the surface of the earth,” as Diderot wrote of it. The Encyclopédie
has almost become synonymous with the Enlightenment, for it offered more than
what we think of an encyclopaedia offering. Not only did it give the latest
facts about everything under the sun, it was full of ‘enlightened’
interpretation. Put another way, it was rather like a massive editorial on all
aspects of life. So controversial were many of the viewpoints that the writers
were frequently in trouble with the censor. Indeed, Diderot even had to spend
some time in prison as a result of his controversial opinions. Nevertheless,
the message of the encyclopaedists
did get out. Their message was that we should view reality in a whole new way,
with man rather than God being the centre. The quotations I am
using are taken from extracts of the Encyclopédie from The
Enlightenment: Texts, I, edited by Simon Eliot and Keith Whitlock (Milton
Keynes: The Open University, 1992).
[12] Diderot, from the article “Political Authority” in the Encyclopédie, cited in The Enlightenment: Texts I, edited by Simon Eliot and Keith Whitlock Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1992), p. 12.
[13] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (Everyman, 1911), p. 228.
[14] Carl L Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1932), p. 66.
[15] See Hampson, op. cit., p. 123.
[16] From Voltaire’s Philosophe Ignorant, cited in Hampson, op. cit., p. 114.
[17] Cited in Lucas, op. cit., p. 114.