姓名: 梁敏专业：英师年级、班级：13级3班
学号：13073019 作业日期：2015.06.15
章节：Chapter 8
作业要求：The Age of Enlightenment
In early 18th century. The Constitutional monarchy set up by parliament in 1688 was a compromise between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats. The cultural life had undergone remarkable changes. Newton’s scientific discovery and the philosophy of John Locke affected people’s thinking of the world. The Age of Enlightenment was a period of scientific awakening, largely centred around France, although the starting point for Enlightenment was John Locke's (1632-1705) book Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which was a relentless attack on metaphysical arguments. Metaphysics is posing the existence of objects that cannot be observed. Reason rather than superstition dominated. English literature was influenced by French enlighteners and ancient Roman writers. Neo-classicism was the leading literary trend.
The Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual movement throughout Western Europe in the 18th cent
ury. It was an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism. The enlighteners fought against class inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. They thought the chief means for bettering the society was "enlightenment" or "education" for the people. The English enlighteners were bourgeois democratic thinkers. They were different from those of France, for they appeared not before but after the bourgeois revolution. They set no revolutionary aim before them and what they strove for was to carry the revolution through to an end.
It was originated in France and many enlighteners prefer to use critical reasons to free minds from prejudice, authority, oppression. The whole movement contains many aspects: religion, art and literature, and economic thought. When talk about the religion part,
people always think about secular and Deism which thought that the universe is set in motion by a God as a self-regulating mechanism; everything was operated according to natural laws, which could be understood by the human mind. The Enlightenment met the church head on, tackling previously avoided issues. It was, at least initially, an act of great courage to defy the church. Having courage of your own understanding. In particular, the Enlightenment allows people to question anything. And at that time, neo-classicism was a great respect for the classical artists. Harmony, proportion, balance and restraint are the styles of their work. The state inference did violate to the law of nature and also fa
vored laissez-faire policies. The focus on self-consciousness led to a break with the past rather than a gradual change and the tendency towards specializations led to hastening of division of disciplines and spawned many specialist journals and an active printing industry. One problem in defining the Enlightenment is that there was a great deal of divergence in the leading thinker’s views, and it is important to recognize that they argued and debated with each other over the correct ways to think and proceed. Enlightenment views also varied geographically, with thinkers in different countries going in slightly different ways. For instance, the search for a “science of man”led some thinkers to search for the physiology of a body without a soul, while others searched for answers to how humanity thought. Still others tried to map humanity’s development from a primitive state, and others still looked at the economics and politics behind social interaction.
The Enlightenment had far-reaching influence on Continental countries in Europe and on Great Britain, reflected in enlightened despotism in central Europe and the reform movement in Britain, and even in the American Revolution. This might have led to some historians wishing to drop the label Enlightenment were it not for the fact that the Enlightenment thinkers actually called their era one of Enlightenment. The thinkers believed that they were intellectually better off than many of their peers, who were still in a superstitious darkness, and they wished to literally lighten’them and their views. Kan
monarchyt’s key essay of the era, “Was ist Aufklärung”literally means “What is Enlightenment?”, and was one of a number of responses to a journal which had been trying to pin down a
definition. Variations in thought are still seen as part of the general movement. Enlightenment thought, they now generally accept that they were merely the vocal tip of a much more widespread intellectual awakening among the middle and upper classes, turning them into a new social force.

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