Revival: A History of Modern Culture: Volume II (1934)

The Enlightenment 1687 - 1776

Preserved Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351349468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The understanding of history can be advanced only by the combination or alternation, of analysis and synthesis. Detailed research and generalizing survey are not antiethical but complementary. For a long time, however, the specialist has reigned supreme in our schools. The need is now, surely, for a return to synoptic writing. The present work was undertaken to supply the need of a synthesis. It is a map of a large region, not a geological chart of a square mile or the plan of a single city. Its value, if any, lies in its view of the interrelations of large tracts of social and intellectual life, not in the intensive investigation of narrow fields.

Chapter I
The Background and the Character of the Enlightenment

1. Political History of the Period 1687 to 1776

After the Great Renewal came the Enlightenment; after the Age of Science the Age of Reason. Doubtless the growing confidence in the powers of the human understanding, the enthronement of reason on the seat once held by authority and tradition, the conquest by science of politics, philosophy, and theology, the triumph of reason over superstition, intolerance, and despotism, the education of the masses in the new world-view, and the final decline of rationalism before the assault of neglected emotions and under the solvent of self-critical analysis and subjectivism—doubtless all this is the supremely important revolution of the eighteenth century. As the story of this intellectual revolution will fill the pages of the present volume, a few words are necessary to introduce the reader to the stage on which was enacted this great drama of the human spirit.

The theater was that portion of the world inhabited by the white race, that is, Western Europe now including Russia, and the ever expanding territories colonized by Europeans in the Americas. As the chronological limits of the age are clearly marked in the intellectual field by the seminal works of Newton and Locke at its beginning, and by the incursions of the idealistic philosophers and of the romantic poets at its end, so the boundaries of the political epoch are conveniently delimited by events which happened in the ninth decade of the seventeenth century and in the eighth decade of the eighteenth.

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) not only proved to be the last act of wholesale intolerance but also marked the beginning of the end of the French hegemony. On the other side of the Channel the English Revolution of 1688–89 marked the beginning of the most glorious epoch of English liberty and of British dominion. Both in material and in spiritual matters the British Empire led the van of progress. The consolidation of the Austro-Hungarian dominions (1687), the entrance of Russia into Western civilization (1689) and her rise to the rank of a Great Power (1721), the rise of Brandenburg and her transformation into the Kingdom of Prussia (1701), and the transfer of Spain from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons (1700) marked the beginning of an epoch which came to an end with the dissolution of the British Empire, with the American and French Revolutions, and with the industrial crisis in the eighth and ninth decades of the eighteenth century.

The changes in the political structure of Europe and America were partly accomplished by a series of long wars. The struggle of France and England for colonial empire and for the hegemony of the world, the conflict of Austria and Prussia for the leadership of Central Europe, and the strife of Russia with her neighbors for the domination of Eastern Europe, became connected by national alliances and coalitions, and finally culminated in that universal mêlée known as the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). The final results of these battles were the expansion and consolidation of the British Empire, of Prussia, and of Russia, at the expense of considerable loss of territory and prestige by France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Sweden.

Not less important than the transfer of wealth and power from one nation to another was the shifting relation of the different classes within each state. Modern times have seen the gradual growth of democracy in the assertion of political leadership by ever larger, and lower, classes. The late seventeenth century, and the eighteenth, even before the great revolutions at its end, saw important steps taken in this direction. Throughout the period of the Enlightenment the older privileged classes lost ground to the Third Estate, or bourgeoisie. The establishment of parliamentary supremacy in Great Britain and in Sweden, the growth of popular government in the North American colonies, the continuation of a republican polity in the Netherlands, the rule of the wealthy burgher class in the growing Free Cities of Germany and of Switzerland, all enlarged the basis of political power within the state, even though all shunned the logical conclusion of the process in universal democracy. In the remaining countries of Europe the same cause produced the benevolent despotism which, while it still denied the people a share in the government, recognized the supreme obligation of the state to promote the prosperity and happiness of its inhabitants.

The rise and fall of nations and of classes can no longer be regarded as anomalous phenomena, to be explained only by the spontaneous efflorescence of individual genius and of national will, or to be left unexplained as the result of chance or of inscrutable destiny. All political changes are the results, or, rather, the superficial indications, of the interplay of deeper social, economic, and intellectual changes. All these, in turn, may be referred to scientific or technical inventions by which that intelligent animal, man, adjusts himself to his environment so as to secure the maximum chance of survival for his species and his group. The political and economic changes of the eighteenth century were due to the expansion of commerce and industry under the stimulus of technical improvements, and to the continued cheapening of knowledge, which is proverbially power, by the development of the printing press. Both of these causes of change had been in operation for two and a half centuries before the era of the Enlightenment; both of them continued to operate after its close.

It is now known to economists that the terms “commercial revolution” and “industrial revolution,” once in common use, give a wrong impression of the historical changes in the production of wealth, as if it consisted in two epochs of sudden advance, one in the early sixteenth century and one in the late eighteenth, with a long period of stagnation between. What really happened in the economic world was not intermittent progress, with sharply defined periods of rapid and slow change, but an uninterrupted improvement in the means of producing wealth, and a great crescendo in its volume, beginning in the late Middle Ages and continuing to the present. This was due to technical improvements in industry and to the increasing ease of commercial intercourse. The process of smelting iron by pit coal, discovered in the reign of James I by a natural son of Lord Dudley, but not widely used until it was revived by Darby of Colebrook in 1735; the invention of the fly-shuttle by John Kay in 1738, and of the spinning-jenny by the Hargreaves in 1764; the improvement of the process of spinning by rollers invented by John Wyatt or Lewis Paul; the perfection of the process of milling silk by Jubié in France—all these are but a few samples of the many discoveries which, in this period, added to the product of industry. At the same time the digging of canals and the building of roads revolutionized land commerce, while the exploration of the globe and the exploitation of new lands added immensely to the volume of maritime traffic.

The general result of the operation of the economic forces just described was to throw wealth and dominion to the sea powers at the expense of the land powers, to favor the Atlantic nations at the cost of the Mediterranean states, and of the Northern European peoples more than of the Southern, and to expand the world of European culture. Within each state the class commanding commercial and industrial wealth gradually assumed the dominating position once held by the landed and military aristocracy and by the landed and spiritual hierarchy of the church.

No nation profited so much by the action of these forces as did Great Britain. The outward-bound tonnage of English trade amounted in 1700 to only 317,000; this increased to 661,000 tons in 1751 and to 959,000 tons in 1783. The symbol and the fortress of the rising money-power was the Bank of England, chartered in 1694, and soon acquiring an influence which, constantly exercised on the side of the Whigs, almost counterbalanced the weight of the church on the side of the Tories. The Union of England and Scotland, which had been merely dynastic since the accession of James I, was perfected by the amalgamation of the Parliaments in 1707. The growth of empire in America and in India greatly augmented the power of the state.

The same period which saw the growth of the First British Empire to its maximum, also witnessed the establishment of constitutional, parliamentary government. The Revolution of 1688–89 transferred the crown from James II to William and Mary, and insured the liberties of the subject and the right of Parliament to make laws, to levy taxes, and to provide for the army. The control of the executive by Parliament was secured by the noiseless revolution, accomplished in the years 1693–96, in the appointment of ministers of the Crown, who could not henceforth perform their functions without the confidence of the party in control of the House of Commons.

Not less striking than the growth of English empire and liberty was the prestige of English thought. As Italy had led Europe in the Renaissance, as Germany had guided the Reformation, as France had dominated the age of the Great Renewal, so England kindled the Enlightenment. Envy of the British Empire and admiration for the British constitution were not more general throughout this period than was the acceptance of British science, philosophy, and religion. While Newton, Locke, and the English Deists reigned over the international Republic of Letters, London became its metropolis. To the spiritual, as to the material, strength of Britain Scotland contributed not a little. The eighteenth century was for the northern kingdom an era of great prosperity, and was also the era in which Scots made their largest contribution to the world of culture, speculative and practical alike.

The resources of the British Empire, cultural as well as economic, were vastly increased during this era by the American colonies. The total population of the twelve continental colonies in 1689 of about 200,000 increased in the thirteen colonies (the thirteenth being Georgia, settled in 1733) by 1760 to 1,300,000 whites and 300,000 negroes. At a time when the population of the British Isles did not exceed nine millions, this made of America a respectable portion of the Empire, as it was by far the most rapidly growing portion. While foreign accounts celebrated the marvelous growth of the colonies, the inhabitants began to cherish a sense of pride in achievement and to feel their strength. The wars between Britain and France, in which the colonists of both countries participated, redounded greatly to the security and advantage of the British settlements by the conquest of Canada and of the French posts west of the Allegheny Mountains.

As in England, so in America the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century saw a remarkable growth of constitutional liberty. As the proprietary, or feudal, colonies became Royal Provinces, the British government began to pay more attention to ruling them. As the settlements were exploited by the Mother Country for her own gain, the divergence of interests of Britain and America became apparent, and was reflected in the constant struggle of the executives, in most colonies appointed by the crown, and the legislative assemblies elected by the people. While parliaments were sinking into decay on the continent of Europe, this efflorescence of popular representative institutions in America constituted an event of immense importance in the history of the world. Moreover, though the franchise was limited by property and religious qualifications, and though some portions of the population, as slaves and as indentured servants, enjoyed scant civil rights, the Americans developed the most democratic society then existing in the world.

Prior to 1689 the white population of the colonies had been chiefly English, with small ingredients of Dutch and of Swedish extraction. Large immigration of French Huguenots, of Scotch and Scotch-Irish, and of Germans began that mixture of stocks destined to form the new American race. Geographical propinquity, the common warfare against French and Indians, the assertion of a common interest against the British rule, and even the efforts of the London government to unite the colonies, all contributed to a growing sense of union which was destined shortly to culminate in the birth of a new nation.

The state of culture in the colonies was high. If the arduous life of the frontier left little time or energy for the cultivation of the amenities of life, the older cities—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—produced as cultured a society as did any provincial English city. That America had no castles was reckoned as a political advantage by Goethe and as a cultural lack by Ruskin. But if she had inherited none of the monuments of architecture or of other arts from a remote past, she established schools and universities as good as those of the old country, and frequented by a much larger proportion of the population, and she eagerly bought and read the best books produced by Europe. Nor was she unable to add to the common stock of ideas. In Jonathan Edwards she produced one of the profoundest religious philosophers, and in Benjamin Franklin one of the greatest of the illuminati of the century.

Analagous to the expansion of European civilization westward was the eastward sweep by which Russia was brought into its circle. While the older Muscovy had been rather Asiatic than European in its barbarism, when transformed into the Empire of all the Russias, in 1721, it became one of the Great Powers, and a member of the cultural group of the Occident. The general causes making this necessary were the improvement in means of communication and in the diffusion of ideas; the instrument by which it was accomplished was the Czar Peter the Great (1682–1725). The vast increase of Russia’s material powers, begun under him and continued under the able rule of Catherine II (1762–96) expanded her borders at the expense of Sweden, Poland, and Turkey, and definitely fixed her boundaries not far from the Amur River in the Far East. Administrative reforms, the creation of a bureaucracy, the breaking of the power of the nobles and of the church, the fostering of the middle class of the towns, were accompanied by economic and social changes of even greater importance. Peter the Great set his subjects an example by completing his education in the shipyards and factories as well as in the courts of England and of the Netherlands. After his return in 1689 he earnestly labored to introduce western technical methods and western fashions among his people. Sending young nobles abroad, and importing foreign artisans, he revolutionized at least the external framework and material basis of Russian civilization. Only under Catherine II did the intellectual life of Russia plunge into the full current of the Enlightenment.

As the rise of one people is often achieved at the expense of another, the expansion of Russia involved the decline of her neighbors. Poland, surrounded by more powerful states, suffered the most. Under the rule of the Saxon dynasty, which ascended her throne in 1697, steadily lost ground to Russia, Prussia, and Austria even before the first partition, by which she was deprived of one-third of her territory in 1772. Internal strife, political and religious, exhausted her strength still further.

Sweden, too, sank under the attack of warlike neighbors. Notwithstanding the military genius of Charles XII her Baltic empire crumbled under the Russian pressure. During half a century, however, she enjoyed a parliamentary government somewhat similar to that of England. A disputed succession in 1720 allowed her diet, or Riksdag, to establish a new and highly popular constitution, in which the king retained little of his former power and became scarcely more than the president of the council, or cabinet, which was dependent on the representatives of the people. The four estates—nobles, clergy, bourgeoisie and peasants—ruled Sweden for fifty-two years under this fundamental law, which came to an end when Gustavus III in 1772 by a coup d’état and with the approval of public opinion, restored absolute rule.

Under the impact of economic forces the political structure of Germany was wholly transformed. Unable to achieve national union, the German people lived in that loose confederation known as the Holy Roman Empire. Among the practically autonomous states in this body, Austria had hitherto been the greatest, and the southern states generally had been the seats of culture. But the industrial and commercial evolution now threw the weight of power, and as a consequence the leadership in culture, to the northern states. While the seaports, and especially Hamburg, benefited by the growing oceanic trade, the states of the great northern plain profited no less by the improvement of internal communications and by the expansion of the market to the eastward consequent upon the rise of Russia. The rulers of the three leading states in the north all became kings: the electors of Saxony were crowned kings of Poland (1697–1763); the electors of Hanover sat on the throne of Great Britain from 1714 to 1837, and the electors of Brandenburg made themselves kings of Prussia in 1701. The rise of this last-named state first to the hegemony of the Empire and then to the position of one of the great powers of Europe, was achieved by a series of wars with Austria, France, and Russia carried on by Frederick the Great (1740–86). The growth of the new state, however, is to be attributed less to the military genius of her king than to the improvement of her canals and roads, and to the growth of her commerce and industry. Her territory, though infertile, is large and unified, and peculiarly amenable to improvement. A very slight correction of her waterways made of her rivers and canals important arteries of trade.

For their lost hegemony in Germany the Hapsburgs compensated themselves by consolidating under their dominion the states to the south and east, and by expansion at the cost of Poland and Turkey. In 1687 the Estates of Hungary renounced their right of electing their monarch, and accepted the Hapsburg dynasty as hereditary. By similar action of the other states under the Austrian rule, and by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1722–23, which forbade the secession of any state, was formed that indissoluble union known for two centuries as Austria-Hungary.

In the late seventeenth century all the German states, big and little, became despotic. The nobles actively seconded and the masses passively acquiesced in the claims of the state to unlimited control over its citizens. The serene grand dukes and most serene electors puffed themselves, like the frog in the fable, to imitate the bull at Versailles. Their courts, furnished with French fashions and veneered with French culture, caricatured the etiquette of Louis XIV. The most amiable affectation of these rulers, from Frederick the Great down to the most insignificant landgrave, was that of enlightened care for their people’s interests. After they had built showy palaces, stocked their parks with game, their cellars with wines, their bedrooms with mistresses, and their audience chambers with flunkeys, they devoted what leisure was left them from an arduous life of pomp and pleasure to promoting the prosperity of their realms, to fostering trade, to repressing religious strife, and to cultivating art and letters.

While the courts, particularly those of Berlin and of Hanover, imported a good deal of French culture, some of the cities developed a more vital and indigenous intellectual life. Hamburg, favored by the influx of commercial wealth, by a free government, and by an ancient tradition of civic life, cultivated music and literature with noted success. During the eighteenth century she was surpassed only by Leipzig, the seat of a great fair. This fair provided the chief market in central Europe for books and for many other articles, and also attracted vast crowds to its exhibition of exotic wonders, or rich wares, and of more popular attractions, such as monsters, mountebanks, monkeys, and magic lanterns. The market held every spring gave Leipzig the primacy in the publishing and printing trades which she has held to this day. Societies and clubs fostered intellectual intercourse, while the theater, the opera, and chamber music were diligently cultivated by the public at large.

Switzerland, first recognized as an independent nation by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), made it her necessary task throughout the eighteenth century to resist the encroachments of France. Internally a strain continued to exist between the Protestant and Catholic cantons. Political power, in the hands of an oligarchy of wealthy burghers, became, on the whole, narrower and less liberal throughout the period.

Ground between the millstones of the French army and the English navy, the Netherlands no longer maintained their political importance in the eighteenth century. The accession of their stadtholder William III to the English throne bound them to the coalition against Louis XIV. After William’s death in 1702, the government became an aristocratic republic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• Chapter I. The Background and the Character of the Enlightenment
• Chapter II. Newtonian Science
• Chapter III. Linnæan Science
• Chapter IV. The Place of Science in Eighteenth-Century Thought
• Chapter V. Philosophy
• Chapter VI. Political and Economic Theory
• Chapter VII. Historiography
• Chapter VIII. Scholarship
• Chapter IX. The Modern Prose Style
• Chapter X. Poetry and Drama
• Chapter XI. The Propaganda of the Enlightenment
• Chapter XII. Education
• Chapter XIII. Religious Reaction and Revival
• Chapter XIV. Deism and Skepticism
• Chapter XV. The Decline of Superstition and Persecution
• Chapter XVI. Laws, Morals, and Manners
• Chapter XVII. Art and Music
• Bibliography
• Index