Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [245]
For some intellectuals, the existence of exotic peoples, such as the natives of Tahiti, presented an image of a “natural man” who was far happier than many Europeans. One intellectual wrote:
The life of savages is so simple, and our societies are such complicated machines! The Tahitian is close to the origin of the world, while the European is closer to its old age…. [The Tahitians] understand nothing about our manners or our laws, and they are bound to see in them nothing but shackles disguised in a hundred different ways. Those shackles could only provoke the indignation and scorn of creatures in whom the most profound feeling is a love of liberty.2
The idea of the “noble savage” would play an important role in the political work of some philosophes.
The travel literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also led to the realization that there were highly developed civilizations with different customs in other parts of the world. China was especially singled out. One German university professor praised Confucian morality as superior to the intolerant attitudes of Christianity. Some European intellectuals began to evaluate their own civilization relative to others. Practices that had seemed to be grounded in reason now appeared to be merely matters of custom. Certainties about European practices gave way to cultural relativism.
Cultural relativism was accompanied by religious skepticism. As these travel accounts made clear, the Christian perception of God was merely one of many. Some people were devastated by this revelation: “Some complete their demoralization by extensive travel, and lose whatever shreds of religion remained to them. Every day they see a new religion, new customs, new rites.”3
As Europeans were exposed to growing numbers of people around the world who were different from themselves, some intellectuals also began to classify people into racial groups. One group espoused polygenesis, or the belief in separate human species; others argued for monogenesis, or the belief in one human species characterized by racial variations. Both groups were especially unsympathetic to Africans and placed them in the lowest rank of humankind. In his Encyclopedia, the intellectual Denis Diderot (see “Diderot and the Encyclopedia” later in this chapter) maintained that all Africans were black and characterized the Negro as a “new species of mankind.”
THE LEGACY OF LOCKE AND NEWTON The intellectual inspiration for the Enlightenment came primarily from two Englishmen, Isaac Newton and John Locke, acknowledged by the philosophes as great minds. Newton was frequently singled out for praise as the “greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.” One English poet declared: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; God said, ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was Light.” Enchanted by the grand design of the Newtonian world-machine, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment were convinced that by following Newton’s rules of reasoning, they could discover the natural laws that governed politics, economics, justice, religion, and the arts.
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John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
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John Locke’s theory of knowledge especially influenced the philosophes. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, written in 1690, Locke denied Descartes’s belief in innate ideas. Instead, argued Locke, every person was born with a tabula rasa, a blank mind:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason