In this week in the course, you will be studying the Enlightenment, the scientific and intellectual movement that swept the Western world in the eighteenth century and that emphasized the use of rational thought to understand the natural and human world. The chief force in the Enlightenment was that of the philosophes, critics who leveled a bitter critique at church, state and society for all the evils that had befallen modern man. In many ways the philosophes were building upon the work of their predecessors, and colleagues, in the concurrent Scientific Revolution, for example the work of Sir Isaac Newton. What the Scientific Revolution did was provide man with an understanding of the laws of nature. Through careful observation and analysis it was realized that man could understand that the natural world worked in accord with a series of set laws, and often those laws could be expressed in mathematical formulae. A good example of this was Newton's law of gravity which gave precise mathematical expression to the motion of a falling object. What the philosophes and critics of the Enlightenment believed was that the same basic principal operating in the scientific world with respect to natural laws was also operating with respect to the human world. In other words, by observing, studying and analyzing human behavior, human society, human government, human institutions, one could learn the laws by which humanity operated. The final conclusion was that once you understood the laws by which man operated you could then proceed to reform him and his environment to improve the lot of humanity and correct the evils in the world. The Enlightenment was very optimistic and positive in its belief that human society and relationships could be perfected and a utopian world achieved sometime in the future. And so what the philosophes were doing was critiquing the institutions and behaviors that were preventing mankind from reaching this perfect utopia of the future. In another way of saying it, the critics were enlightening man to his condition, bringing man out of the darkness into the light so that man could realize his own potential and create this perfect world in the future. The primary objects of the critique of the Enlightenment were the political state and the church, both of which were deemed responsible for much of the catastrophic state in which man lived. There was a whole series of famous critics who produced new theories of politics, and many of those theories became embodied in political documents such as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. And so, in a way, the philosophes actually did achieve some success in seeing their principles being enacted in new political entities that came into existence during and after the Enlightenment.