This movement is influenced by the Scientific Revolution in southern Europe arising directly from the Italian Renaissance with people like Galileo Galilei. They redefined the study of knowledge to fit the ethics and aesthetics of their time. Their works had great influence at the end of the 18th century, in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution.
These ideas were well understood in Europe, but beyond France the idea of "enlightenment" had generally meant a light from outside, whereas in France it meant a light coming from knowledge one gained. In the most general terms, in science and philosophy, the Enlightenment aimed for the triumph of reason over faith and belief ; in politics and economics, the triumph of the bourgeois over nobility and clergy. Inquiries to establish certain axioms and mathematical proofs continued as Cartesianism throughout the 17th century.
British philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and David Hume adopted an approach, later called empiricism , which preferred the use of the senses and experience over that of pure reason.
Baruch Spinoza took Descartes' side, most of all in his Ethics. Spinoza's thought was based on a model of the universe where God and Nature are one and the same. This became an anchor in the Age of Enlightenment , [ 4 ] held across the ages from Newton's time to that of Thomas Jefferson 's — A notable change was the emergence of a naturalist philosophy , spreading across Europe, embodied by Newton.
The scientific method — exploring experimental evidence and constructing consistent theories and axiom systems from observed phenomena — was undeniably useful. The predictive ability of its resulting theories set the tone for his masterwork Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica Naturalism saw the unification of pure empiricism as practiced by the likes of Francis Bacon with the axiomatic, "pure reason" approach of Descartes.
