Uniformity amidst Variety. The educational process
needed to make society inhabitable by man is the
common task of science (especially the science of soci-
ety), of art, of religion, and of education in the techni-
cal sense. Unity and correlation supply principal
themes in this respect. The interrelation and mutual
dependence of institutions, of people, and of nations,
the unity and hierarchy of the sciences are widely
discussed. The
Encyclopédie, starting from and com-
plementing Bacon's logical classification of the sciences
by an historical arrangement, brings into view Francis
Hutcheson's principle of uniformity amidst variety, the
significance of the interconnection of the parts with
the whole. Hume's science of human nature is an
attempt at basing all the sciences on a common
methodology; his
Treatise of Human Nature has the
subtitle “being an attempt to introduce the experi-
mental method [of Bacon and Newton] into moral
subjects.” At the end of the period, Dugald Stewart,
in his “Preliminary Dissertation, containing some criti-
cal Remarks on the Discourse prefixed to the French
Encyclopedia” (
Philosophical Essays [1810], in
Works,
V, Edinburgh [1855], 5-54), adds a functional approach
to the merely classificatory, earlier arrangements of the
sciences of matter and mind. The full title of
Montesquieu's
esprit des lois emphasizes the rapport
of the legal system with the constitution, the manners,
the climate, the religion, the commerce, etc. of a peo-
ple. In 1800 Madame de Staël published her
De la
Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institu-
tions sociales. The structure and historical totality and
cohesion of social units supplies the raison d'être of
Universal Histories and the national histories of the
Scottish school and its followers. Vico's
Scienza nuova
(1725) maps out both the common fundamental princi-
ples of mankind and the historical “philology” of indi-
vidual peoples, i.e., the contribution of their free and
creative will. Hume provides a definitive methodologi-
cal basis for a macrosociological theory in his essay
“On National Characters” (1748).
Comparative historical and anthropological studies
confirm the interaction of nations as an enrichment of
national character. “By comparing among all nations
laws with laws, talents with talents, and manners with
manners, nations will find so little reason to prefer
themselves to others, that if they preserve for their own
country that love which is the fruit of self-interest, at
least they will lose that fanaticism which is the fruit
of exclusive self-esteem” (Encyclopédie, article
“Législateur”). D'Alembert, in De la Liberté de la
musique, exemplifies the interchangeability and
interaction of forms of art as means of expression.
Cosmopolitanism, toleration, universality are qualities
closely bound up with this interest in common roots
and functions, and characterize the leading ideas of
the Enlightenment.
