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Julian Lopez Pacheco

Lara Merlin

HIS141

November 5, 2021

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment started as a political, cultural, social, religious, and intellectual

movement and comprehends between 17th and 18th century. This was major period that

revolutionizes the way we live and think, and it was caused because of political and

contemporary social abuses at that time. It was strongly concerning and questioning major

thoughts at that time like God, reason, nature, and humanity; those questions and major changes

vastly started to arise on the western countries. Additionally, the enlightenment period served as

an open door to a big revolution at that time, which a transformation for some regions was

considerably needed.

According to the book, it states that “Enlightenment thinker believed that human beings

could comprehend nature and mold it for material and moral improvement”. In other words, they

believed the human being has the capacity to adapt their selves purely to ethical and moral rules.

The ideals of the Enlightenment were basically to make societies more rational, scientific, and to

have a huge reform of many aspects as religion to be tolerant to each other; this is because at that

age, countries were ruled by theocentric thoughts which means God is everything, that is the

central part of existence, which was highly opposed to this movement.

Enlightenment thinkers were united to seek liberty, fraternity, progress, tolerance, secular

state, etc. Many philosophers surged on this era as a part of revolution like Voltaire (human

society needs to be improved urgently), John Locke (agreed that we as humans have natural
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rights such as life, liberty, property, and never should be taken away, they were inalienable

rights), Montesquieu (believed the purpose of government must be always to maintain law and

order against all odds), etc.

Not only as social thoughts the Enlightenment meant to be, but scientific as well such as

the scientific revolution. These enormously helped by developing scientific ideas that will

deliver knowledge and a reason of how nature works and maintains by itself, scientists such as

Isaac Newton (established a basis for physics like the law of universal gravitation), Galileo

Galilei (believed in the concept of universe is subject entirely to mathematical laws), Nicolaus

Copernicus (contributed that the sun and whatever is in the sky revolved around the earth),

Johannes Kepler (contributed with three fundamental laws of planetary motion), etc.

The effects of the Enlightenment were majorly revolutionary because transformed the

way we live and think, such as religion stop being the center of everything, people started to

have more freedom, the high social class was devastated by reforms that were not helpful for

them, science overtook the major thoughts at that era, and gave amazing discovering on things

we currently know.

In conclusion, the Enlightenment was a major movement that moved masses principally

on western countries to change the way we live and think. It gave a sense of liberty, revolution,

progress, etc. We as humans understand how the universe is and how we could change our life

here on earth made by governments, laws, order, and majorly by ethical and moral thoughts.
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Works Cited

Craig, Graham, Kagan, Ozment, and Turner, The Heritage of World Civilizations.

Pearson.