The Rise of Natural Philosophy, Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment (^) ‹ 113
the notion of miracles was contradicted by human reason. Hume also attacked the deist
position, arguing that the order humans perceived in the universe was probably the product
of human minds and social conventions, concluding that all religion was based on “hope
and fear.” In the final analysis, Hume contended that reason must be the ultimate test and
that belief should be in proportion to evidence.
Voltaire
The most famous skeptic of the Enlightenment wrote under the pen name of Voltaire. He
raised satire to an art form and used it to criticize those institutions that promoted intoler-
ance and bigotry. For his criticism of the French monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church,
he was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille. While in exile in England, he became an admirer
of Newton and Locke. In Lettres philosophiques (Philosophic Letters on the English) (1734),
he compared the constitutional monarchy, rationalism, and toleration that he found in
England with the absolutism, superstition, and bigotry of his native France. Later, he pro-
duced a sprawling satire of European culture in Candide (1759). For a time he lived and
worked with the most accomplished female philosophe, Madame du Châtelet, who made
the only French translation of Newton’s Principia.
Pascal
Not all philosophers of the Enlightenment were so quick to separate Christianity from
science. Many tried to reconcile the two, including French mathematician Blaise Pascal.
Pascal’s contributions are many, from an early version of the calculator, to the foundations
of probability theory. He is probably best known though, for Pensées, an unfinished book
published posthumously as a collection of his thoughts. In it, he attempted to unite religion
and reason. He claimed men without religion are an odd mixture of greatness and lowli-
ness and that philosophy alone could not explain this contradiction. To convince skeptics,
he offered his famous wager: it is rational to believe in God. If there is no God, one loses
nothing. If there is a God, one gains eternal paradise.
Spinoza
Benedict Spinoza took an alternative approach to those who separated the laws of nature
and of God. To his mind, God and Nature were not separate at all, but two aspects of the
same thing. A sort of pantheistic approach, he argued that God is everywhere and every-
thing is God. Accordingly, he contended that God was not separate from the world but
existed as the system of the world in all its aspects. This led him to conclude that the system
was deterministic and that man did not have free will. Rather, his actions, as all actions
within the system, were driven by necessity. Since the world system is perfectly ordered and
predetermined by God, moral ideas of good and evil are, therefore, arbitrary and artificial
constructs of men. As such, Spinoza was a proponent of moral relativism.
The Arts in the Enlightenment
During the seventeenth century and even into the early eighteenth century, the arts were
dominated by the Baroque style, characterized by dramatic uses of light and shadow,
emotion, and tension, and whose religious and sometimes grandiose themes were often
supported by elites, especially in predominantly Catholic nations. Later, the eighteenth
century saw the creation of new opportunities for artists, as the rise of a wealthy middle
class broke the aristocratic monopoly on artistic patronage. The tastes of middle-class
or bourgeois patrons were simpler than those of their aristocratic counterparts; the art15_Bartolini_Ch15_099-118.indd 113 27/04/18 1:54 PM