While this week’s readings are vastly different with regards to their specific content, they all certainly can be seen as quite similar when analyzed from the viewpoint of core Enlightenment values (such as progression of science, society, and non-adherence to religion).
Beginning with Francis Bacon’s piece, “The New Science,” we see that the importance of science is finally being recognized. Written early on in the Enlightenment, in 1620, Bacon describes how “human knowledge” and “human power” must be able to propel society to achieve something greater (39). Bacon wrote that human understanding distorted “the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (42). Surely he was talking about religion, and how the lens which people were viewing the world was greatly skewed by their religious value systems.
At the later stages of the time period, Condorcet wrote in 1794 on the same values of science that Bacon had touched upon. However, in contrast to Bacon’s writing, Condorcet believed that society had already progressed a great amount as we had begun to research and discuss phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed. He wrote, “prejudice has been destroyed, and the human understanding in some sort rectified; after having been forced into a wrong direction by absurd objects of belief, transmitted from generation to generation, taught at the misjudging period of infancy, and enforced with the terrors of superstition and the dread of tyranny” (67). Essentially, he is adding onto Bacon’s point that religions lead society in the wrong direction, and that now that we have accepted science human understanding is what it should be.
We read example of science coming into our lives in Franklin’s many small anecdotes on the occurrences of weather (and how to explain them rationally), and with his famous kite experiment. In addition, Buffon’s piece displays how a diversity of topics was being explored during the time. His writing on the many species of rats, and their varying names and whatnot, is a small example of how acquiring all of this new knowledge allowed for us to get out of the period in which there was an “infant-darkness of mankind” with regards to human understanding of the world (61).
Finally, on a completely different note, John Cleland’s very graphic “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” is more than simply just a work of erotic fiction. Published in 1749, the his novel appalled the bishop of London and most likely many other citizens, as sex was not talked about in this open of a manner at the time. His work can therefore be seen as another way of challenging what was perceived as acceptable at the time. Denis Diderot then adds onto to the same notion that Cleland was getting at by stating that sex and religion are essentially incompatible, and that something is very wrong with that as, “The propagation of beings is the greatest object of nature” (266). These various works all challenged pre-conceived notions and (in their own unique ways) advocated for the advancement of human understanding.
