314 Ch. 9 • Enlightened Thought And The Republic: Of Letters
Intellectual Influences on Enlightened Thought
Like all intellectual and cultural movements, the Enlightenment did not
emerge spontaneously. Creating what David Hume (171 1-1776) called
“the science of man,” the philosophes reflected the influence of the Scien
tific Revolution, whose proponents had espoused the scientific method in
the study of nature and the universe. Sir Isaac Newton, the brilliant English
scientist and theoretician (see Chapter 8), emphasized that science—reason
and experimentation—holds the key to understanding nature, and that
mankind discovers knowledge not through religious teaching but through
“observation, analysis, and experiment.”
Two thinkers linked the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
thought: John Locke and Georges-Louis Buffon. Locke (1632-1704)
claimed that philosophy was, as much as astronomy, a discipline subject to
the rigors of the scientific method and critical inquiry. The son of a
landowner and a member of the British Royal Society, Locke maintained a
strong interest in medicine. After returning from Holland, where he had
gone into self-imposed exile during the political crisis swirling around the
throne of King James II, Locke remained close to the government of King
William and Queen Mary (see Chapter 6).
Locke believed that the scientific method could be applied to the study
of society. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke
postulated that each individual is a tabula rasaf or blank slate, at birth.
Believing that all knowledge is sensory, Locke denied the existence of