How Did the Scientific Revolution Influence the Enlightenment?
The model of mathematical certainty, the secularization of ethics, the salons, the Encyclopédie, the public lecture, and the transfer of authority from churches and monarchs to the reasoned public.
How Did the Scientific Revolution Influence the Enlightenment?
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was, in large part, the long-term legacy of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth. The conviction that the natural world could be understood by human reason, the conviction that public demonstration was preferable to private authority, the conviction that the universe was governed by discoverable laws, and the conviction that the rational investigation of nature was a worthwhile and even noble activity — all of these were direct inheritances from the new natural philosophy of the seventeenth century. The philosophes of the eighteenth century — Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Hume, Smith, Condorcet — were heirs to the seventeenth-century natural philosophers, and they took from them the central elements of the Enlightenment program. The influence was not, however, a simple matter of cause and effect. The philosophes were critical of much that the seventeenth century had produced, including its natural theology, its deference to great men, its continuing reliance on Latin, and its attachment to the mechanical philosophy of corpuscles in motion. They wanted a science that was usedful, a knowledge that was accessible, and a reason that was unconstrained by religious or political authority. The transformation of seventeenth-century natural philosophy into eighteenth-century Enlightenment science was itself a major intellectual event, and it was the bridge between the Scientific Revolution and the modern world. For a broader account of the political and philosophical legacy, see Science, Politics, and the Enlightenment. For the connection between the new science and the modern democratic ideal, see What Is the Connection Between Science and Democracy?. And for the broader social impact of the revolution, see The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Society. For the method on which the new science was based, see What Is the Scientific Method?.
The Model of Mathematical Certainty
The most direct influence of the Scientific Revolution on the Enlightenment was the model of mathematical certainty. The new natural philosophy of the seventeenth century — Galileo’s mechanics, Descartes’s geometry, Newton’s Principia — had demonstrated that the careful application of mathematical reasoning to questions of natural philosophy could produce reliable knowledge, of the kind that could be communicated, replicated, and built upon. The model of mathematical certainty tookn up by the philosophes and applied to a wide range of questions — moral, political, economic, and social — that had previously been the province of theology and tradition. The application of mathematical reasoning to moral and political questions is most visible in the work of the French philosophes. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) was an attempt to apply the methods of the new natural philosophy to the comparative study of political institutions. The project of political arithmetic — the statistical study of populations, economies, and societies — was established in the late seventeenth century by William Petty, and it tookn up in the eighteenth century by a wide range of writers. The project of moral arithmetic — the calculation of the probabilities of human actions — was established by Pascal and Fermat in the 1650s, and it tookn up in the eighteenth century by the mathematicians of probability theory. The model of mathematical certainty, in short, was one of the principal tools of the Enlightenment.
The Secularization of Ethics
The Scientific Revolution contributed to the gradual secularization of European ethics. In the medieval and early modern periods, the standards of right and wrong were understood to be derived from divine revelation, as interpreted by the Church. By the late eighteenth century, the standards of right and wrong were increasingly understood to be derived from human reason, as applied to the study of human nature. The secularization of ethics was a long process, and it was driven by a number of factors. The new natural philosophy, with its insistence on the public demonstration of claims about the natural world, made it increasingly difficult to base ethical claims on the authority of revelation alone. The work of the new moral philosophers — Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Smith — drew on the methods of the new natural philosophy to develop accounts of human nature that did not require a theological foundation. The work of the philosophes — Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Helvétius, Holbach — pushed the secularization further, and developed ethical systems that were explicitly grounded in human reason and human experience. The secularization of ethics was not a simple story of religion being displaced by reason. Many of the principal figures of the Enlightenment, including Locke, Newton, and most of the English philosophes, were devout Christians. The secularization was a matter of the gradual separation of the domains of ethics and religion, in which the standards of right and wrong were increasingly understood to be derivable from human reason alone, while the standards of salvation were still understood to be derivable from divine revelation. The separation of the two domains, however incomplete, was one of the principal legacies of the Enlightenment.
The Salons and the Republic of Letters
The new science was conducted not only in the formal institutions — the universities, the scientific societies, the royal academies — but also in the informal institutions — the salons, the coffee houses, the private laboratories, the correspondence networks. The informal institutions were particularly important for the dissemination of the new science to the educated public, and they were the principal venues in which the new science was transformed into Enlightenment thought. The salon, in particular, was a crucial institution of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The salon was a regular social gathering, hosted by a wealthy and educated host, at which a wide range of topics were discussed by a mixed audience of men and women, scholars and dilettantes, scientists and writers. The most famous salons of the eighteenth century — the salons of Madame de Tencin, Madame Geoffrin, Madame d’Épinay, and Julie de Lespinasse in Paris, the salons of Madame du Châtelet and the Marquis du Châtelet in Cirey — were the principal venues in which the new natural philosophy was discussed, popularized, and transformed into Enlightenment thought. The Republic of Letters — the informal community of educated Europeans who corresponded with one another across national and confessional boundaries — was another crucial institution. The Republic of Letters included natural philosophers, philosophers, historians, jurists, theologians, and men of letters, and it was held together by the regular exchange of letters, books, and pamphlets. The Republic of Letters was the principal medium by which natural philosophy was disseminated across Europe, and it was the institutional predecessor of the international scientific community of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Encyclopédie
The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, published between 1751 and 1772 in 28 volumes, was the most ambitious publication of the European Enlightenment, and it was explicitly organized around the new science. The editors, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, were both trained in the new philosophy, and they organized the Encyclopédie around a system of cross-references designed to allow a reader to follow the chain of natural causes from physics through chemistry through biology through physiology through medicine. The Encyclopédie was not just a reference work. It was a polemical work, designed to promote the Enlightenment program of useful knowledge, public reason, and the systematic application of this new approach to the improvement of human life. The publication of the Encyclopédie was repeatedly obstructed by the French authorities, and several of its contributors were imprisoned or exiled. The success of the Encyclopédie — it went through several editions and was widely pirated across Europe — was one of the great cultural events of the eighteenth century, and it was the principal medium by which the reformed philosophy was disseminated to a wide European audience. The Encyclopédie was also the model for a number of similar projects across Europe. The Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers (1728) was an English precursor. The Oekonomische Encyklopädie of Johann Georg Krünitz (1773–1858) was a German successor. The Encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832) was a French successor organized by subject rather than alphabetically. The encyclopedia, as a genre, was a direct legacy of the Enlightenment, and it was one of the principal means by which natural philosophy was disseminated to a wide audience.
The Public Lecture and the Demonstration
The public lecture, in which a natural philosopher or popularizer presented the reformed natural philosophy to a mixed audience, was another crucial institution of the Enlightenment. The public lecture had its roots in the medieval university and the early modern academia, but it acquired a new importance in the eighteenth century, as the audience for science expanded to include the educated public. The public lectures of the eighteenth century — on natural philosophy, on chemistry, on astronomy, on anatomy — were attended by men and women from a wide range of social backgrounds, and they were one of the principal means by which the experimental science was disseminated to the general public. The public demonstration, in which a natural philosopher exhibited the apparatus of the new philosophy of nature to a live audience, was a particular form of the public lecture that became extremely popular in the eighteenth century. The demonstrations of the new chemistry, with the burning of substances in air, the production of gases, the synthesis of compounds, were particularly popular. The demonstrations of the new electricity, with the Leyden jar, the lightning rod, the Voltaic pile, were the most spectacular. The demonstrations of the new astronomy, with the orrery, the planetarium, the telescope, were the most awe-inspiring. The public demonstration, in short, was a major cultural institution of the Enlightenment, and it was one of the principal means by which the new philosophy was disseminated to a wide audience.
The Transfer of Authority
One of the most important consequences of the Scientific Revolution, in its Enlightenment dimension, was the gradual transfer of authority from churches and monarchs to the reasoned public. In the medieval and early modern periods, the principal sources of authority in European life were the Church and the monarch. By the late eighteenth century, the principal source of authority in many domains of European life was the reasoned public — the community of educated readers, writers, and speakers who, in the salons, the coffee houses, the academies, and the press, conducted the public business of reason. The transfer of authority was not a single event. It was a long process, in which the reformed philosophy established the model of public, reasoned deliberation; the new institutions — the scientific societies, the academies, the journals, the encyclopedias — provided the venues for that deliberation; the new audience — the educated public — provided the participants; and the new political events — the American and French revolutions — provided the political expression. The transfer, in short, was the cumulative product of the new learning, the new institutions, the new audience, and the new politics. The model of public, reasoned deliberation that natural philosophy established is one of the central legacies of the Scientific Revolution. It is the immediate ancestor of the modern idea of public reason, the public sphere, the democratic public, and the modern scientific community. The model, however incomplete its realization, is one of the most valuable inheritances of the Enlightenment.
The Long-Term Legacy
The long-term legacy of the Scientific Revolution, in its Enlightenment dimension, was the establishment of a culture in which public, reasoned, evidence-based deliberation was the norm rather than the exception. The Enlightenment, in turn, was the foundation of the modern world — the world of democratic politics, of human rights, of scientific medicine, of industrial technology, of international cooperation, and of the ongoing project of using human reason to improve the human condition. See How Did the Scientific Revolution Influence the Enlightenment?. The connection between the seventeenth-century science and the modern democratic ideal is examined in What Is the Connection Between Science and Democracy?. And the broader social impact of the revolution is set out in The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Society.