Enlightened Ideas 315inherited abilities and rejected the idea that humanity is stained by origi
nal sin, a view held by the Catholic Church. He anticipated that the dis
covery of more laws of nature would be the basis of secular laws on which
society should be based. He was confident that humanity might thereby be
able to improve social conditions.
Locke had asserted the dignity of the individual in contending that every
person has the right to life, liberty, and property (though he excluded slaves
in the Americas from such innate rights). He argued that monarchies were
based on a social contract between rulers and the ruled. People had to
relinquish some of their liberty in exchange for security. But, unlike
Thomas Hobbes, who famously believed that individuals should surrender
their rights to the absolute state of unlimited sovereignty in exchange for
protection from the “state of nature,” Locke insisted that mankind’s liberty
and rights stemmed from the laws of nature. He became a leading propo
nent of educational reform, freedom of the press, religious toleration, and
the separation of political powers.
Locke’s interest in the relationship between nature and the social order
led him to consider issues of gender. The assumption that the king ruled
his nation as a husband and father ruled his wife and children had been
prominent in early modern political theory, only briefly challenged by a
handful of radicals during the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth cen
tury. Locke argued against the contemporary vision of the state in which “all
power on earth is either derived from or usurped from the fatherly power.”
He denied the appropriateness of the analogy between the family and the
state as patriarchal institutions. Rejecting the contemporary view that
Adam held supremacy over Eve, he viewed marriage, like government, to
be organized by social contract. However, Locke went no further than
that, and his espousal of equality within marriage remained only an ideal.
In everyday life, he believed that women should defer to men. But Locke’s
analysis of the family as an institution nonetheless helped stimulate intel
lectual interest in the social role of women.
Georges-Louis Buffon (1707-1788) linked the Scientific Revolution to
the Enlightenment. Buffon, whose initial presentation to the French Royal
Academy of Science was a study of probability theory applied to gambling
on hopscotch, became the curator of the Royal Gardens. Surrounded by
monkeys and badgers in his laboratory, he carried out experiments, some of
which worked, such as his study of the burning effect of the sun through
glass, and some of which did not, including his study of the emotional life
of birds. Buffon’s experiments with cooling metals led him to build a large
forge near his home in Burgundy.
The philosophes acknowledged their debt to the late-seventeenth-century
proponents of the scientific method. Voltaire saluted Newton for having
called on scientists and philosophers “to examine, weigh, calculate, and
measure, but never conjecture.” Hume insisted that all knowledge came
from critical inquiry and scientific discovery and that the ability to reason