RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Enlightenment
There Bayle published his dictionary and edited his journal (Nouvelles de la republiques des lettres, 1684-87), and Le Clerc published his 8. Litera- Bibliotheque universelle (1686-1726). ture of the The real origin of the literature of the Enlighten- Enlightenment, however, was in Engment. land after the Whig Revolution and the establishment of the freedom of the press in 1693. Locke (d. 1704) and Shaftesbury (d. 1713) were writers of elegance. Pope's Essay on Man (1733) is a theodicy in the spirit of Shaftesbury. The publication of periodicals dealing with contemporary manners and morals prepared the way for the realistic study of life which Fielding (d. 1754), Smollett (d. 1771), Goldsmith (d. 1774), and Sterne (d. 176S) were to carry on with splendid psychological power and absolute freedom from theological predispositions. Defoe (d. 1731) pictured man in a state of nature, and exercised a profound influence on Rousseau and German pedagogy. Bolingbroke (d. 1751) was the first to write philosophic history. The moral theories of the Deists were expounded by Hutcheson (d. 1747), Ferguson (d. 1816), Adam Smith (d. 1790), Wollaston (d. 1724), Price (d. 1791), and Tucker (d. 1799), and the esthetic theories of Shaftesbury were developed by Burke (d. 1797), Gerard (d. 1795), and Hume (d. 1776) who" studied the relations between the beautiful and the useful and greatly influenced the German Enlightenment. Richardson's (d. 1761) novels of middle class sentimentality and morals produced an important effect on Voltaire, Diderot, Klopstock, Lessing, and Wieland. The Enlightenment literature in England was not radical, however; extremists, like Toland (d. 1722) among Deists, exercised no great influence, while materialism found in Hartley (d. 1757) and Priestley (d. 1804) only solitary champions. The decline of the Enlightenment in England may be dated from the reaction following the outbreak of the French Revolution.
In France the Enlightenment first gained strength among the dilettante nobility of the court of Louis XIV from whom it passed to the members of the higher bourgeoisie and the literary class, and then to the great mass of the Third Estate. From the classic literature which it found ready to its hand it derived precision, elegance, and wit, but also something of the shallowness that goes with these qualities. Newton and Locke were introduced to the French public by Maupertuis (d. 1759) and D'Argenson (d. 1757). The novel and drama of English citizen life were copied by Prevost (d. 1763) and Destouches (d. 1754). But the highest development of the Enlightenment literature came toward the middle of the century when in a spirit of extreme radicalism it assailed everything in society, Church, and State. The exponents of the Enlightenment may be divided into three groups which differed appreciably in character and succeeded each other in prominence, though united in aim. (1) English liberalism and deism were advocated with remarkable success by Voltaire (d. 1778) in almost every literary form; his interests were predominantly religious. Montesquieu IV.— 10
(d. 1753) gave his time to history and politics and became the father of pragmatic history and constitutionalism. (2) The succeeding scientific and materialistic movement was originated by La Mettrie (d. 1751), found its most celebrated exponent in Diderot (d. 1784), and its classic formulation in the " Encyclopedia" (1751-80). More purely scientific were Holbach (Systeme de la nature, 1770), Condillac (d. 1780) and his theories of knowledge, Cabanis (d. 1808), and Buffon (d. 1788), whose literary charm made him one of the most influential of popularizers of science. (3) A new spirit and tone appears in Rousseau (d. 1778) who expressed the economic theories of the Enlightenment in their deepest and most abstract form and on the other hand lent to its cold intelligence a romantic warmth and a depth of feeling that widened immensely its range of appeal. Through Mirabeau and Si eyes the ideas of the Enlightenment entered the Revolution.
From England and France the elements of the Enlightenment came to Germany, where, owing to peculiar conditions, its political manifestations were of far less importance than its influence in the fields of religion, ethics and esthetics. Two
distinct literary movements marked 9. The the eighteenth century: (1) The real German literature of the Enlightenment pro- Enlighten- ceeded from the popularized teachings ment. of Leibnitz, through Wolff and Gott-
sched, and developed on the one hand into theological and legal rationalism, and on the other into the novel and play of middle class morals. (2) The revived humanistic or classic-romantic movement, proceeding from English sources and from the more essential teachings of Leibnitz, passed through Lessing to Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, and Humboldt and found expression also in the newer schools of philosophy and the historical and psychological sciences. Leibnitz, Lessing, and Kant belong to both movements; to the Enlightenment, through their practical interests and the results of their popularized teachings; to the second, through the deep and original content of their philosophy which was appreciated only by the minority. Only the former movement is here to be considered, a movement through which Germany assumed its place in the literary world, last, because the theological influence had longest maintained itself in the small German principalities, because science was still subject to scholasticism, and finally because of peculiar political conditions. The first change to be noticed occurred in the sphere of learning where Pufendorf (d. 1694) and Leibnitz (d. 1716) ushered in a broad, cosmopolitan treatment of the sciences. The first to gain a wide hearing for the new ideas was Thomasius (d. 1728), who sought to reorganize education after the French model and in 1688 established a periodical similar to those published in Holland at the time. Wolff (d. 1754) slowly drove scholasticism from the universities. The real founders of the literature of the German Enlightenment, however, were Gottsched (d. 1766) who combined the Wolffian philosophy with French classicism and translated Bayle, and Gellert (d. 1769) who, writing under
Enlightenment Ennodius