Forerunners. According to D'Alembert's “Discours
préliminaire” to the Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment
brought to fruition the aspirations of two earlier pe-
riods of enlightenment, namely, classical Greece and
the Renaissance and Reformation. Greek ideas,
supported by such Latin authors as Seneca and Vergil,
made a great impact upon the thought of the eight-
eenth century. While the old metaphysics, Hobbes's
“Aristotelity,” was relegated to the background, the
individualism and the conception of knowledge as
being merely provisional, the Platonic application of
mathematics, his Eros and Kalokagathia, an Aristotel-
ian conception of nature, the anthropology and ethics
of Stoic philosophy, a Protagorean humanism as well
as Plutarch's notions of nation and liberty—echoes of
all these views reveal the continuity of the thought
of the period with the past. However, in contrast to
Renaissance and humanism, the interest in classical
models was not a matter of imitation of the Ancients.
The “
Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” had
exposed the treasures of classical art and scholarship
to a new critical evaluation of their intrinsic value.
Voltaire and his followers went so far as to reject the
Greek heritage because of its failure to order its social
and political problems; others found refuge from the
discontents of their own time in its beauty and thought.
A spate of outstanding writing on the history of Greece
and Rome all through the period serves as witness to
the living presence of the classical world. The young
Gibbon gave expression to the representative modern
attitude: “I think that the study of literature, that habit
of alternatively becoming a Greek or a Roman, a disci-
ple of Zeno or of Epicurus, is admirably adapted to
develop and exercise... the rare power of going back
to simple ideas, of seizing and combining first princi-
ples” (Gibbon,
Essai sur l'étude de la littérature [1761],
Para. XLVII).
Traces of the thought of medieval forerunners from
Roger Bacon onwards can be widely discerned in
Enlightenment writings. The decisive forerunners were
Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton in the field of method-
ology, Francis Bacon and Locke both for their substan-
tive philosophy and their empirical approach, Grotius,
Bodin, and Hobbes for their social and political
thought. In general terms, the period was characterized
by a shift of emphasis from old to new anthropological
metaphysics, from the preoccupation with natural sci-
ence to history and the social and life sciences, a turn-
ing away from dogma and traditional conventions, a
critical reappraisal of established authority in the fields
of religion, politics, philosophy, and the arts. The
human situation and man's liberty, the place of man
in society, the interrelation of social and natural phe-
nomena, their “uniformity amidst variety” come to
condition the guiding lines of thought. The Enlighten-
ment was an iconoclastic movement intent both on
interpreting and ushering in social change. Radical
structural changes were occurring in society; they help
to explain why certain ideas came to be regarded as
relevant while others were rejected. In England the
new ideas were largely an expression of contemporary
reality; elsewhere, by way of reforms, and often only
of utopias, they merely gave evidence of a challenge
to a historical situation which lagged behind a new
consciousness of what was possible and desirable.
