Describe the Enlightenment movement of the 17th and 18th centuries. What ideas did Enlightenment thinkers have in common? In what ways did their views differ? What differing effects did Enlightenment ideas have across Europe?

The Enlightenment movement of the 17th and 18th centuries was a period of great thought, ideas and questioning, which would precipitate later effects that reflected these enlightened concepts in government, the arts, religion, education, and the economy. Those that embodied the Enlightenment principles in their writings, the “philosophes”, as they called themselves, set out to enlighten the world, by combating ignorance, superstition, tyranny, and conventional institutions and accepted doctrines of society. They did this by proposing such radical and challenging ideas by way of their so-called “republic of letters”, ideas that were derived and inspired by the previous Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17 centuries, which upheld the school of empiricism, experiment and analytical study of nature as the means by which to derive truth. However, by no means did all the philosophes agree on their ideals of the Enlightenment. Besides the variations found in the ideas of the philosophes from country to country, political system to political system, approaches to the problems of 17th and 18th Western European society varied widely according to a philosophe’s background, upbringing, religious influences, socioeconomic position and privilege, as well as their own principles and ideals. Thus, Enlightenment thinkers, while having commonalities, brought a wide variety of ideas into European society to be debated over and eventually manifested in the gradual, or sometimes, as in the French Revolution, drastic changes that would take place in the following period. Isaac Newton, although primarily a physicist, mathemetician, and astronomer, created an essential link between the empiricism of Francis Bacon to the analytical reasoning and use of