The Enlightenment in Europeand the Americas (Volume D)

• classical ideals versus progress and modernity

• faith and imagination versus reason• “I” as individual versus society• God as a watchmaker, Deism• reason: “the power by which man deduces

one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences” (Dr. Johnson, Dictionary, 92).

Background

Background (continued)

• human reason• freedom• free market• Kant, controlled

politics• problems with racism

and slavery• “progress”

Newton

Religion

• Deism• scientific study as a

divine or spiritual study

• individual and the universe

• Great Chain of Being

• social instability

• decorum, civility

• social hierarchy

• gender roles

• absence of children

Society

• suitable subjects

• proper language and style

• purpose of writing: to delight and to instruct

• artifice or reality?

• art’s purpose

Decorum

Alexander Pope

“But ALL subsists by elemental strife; And Passions are the elements of Life. The general ORDER, since the whole began, Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man” (An Essay on Man, lines 169–71).

The Enlightenment was a time of great tension between the ideals of __________ .

a. tradition and progressb. philosophy and literaturec. poetry and dramad. religion and Deism

Test Your Knowledge

Enlightenment philosophers and writers, regardless of their belief in tradition or progress, tended to value which of the following?

a. imaginationb. natural philosophyc. reasond. realism

Test Your Knowledge

The topic of children is largely absent from Enlightenment writing because __________.

a. infant mortality was so highb. children were not understood to possess reasonc. children were not taught to read until adulthoodd. the topic of children was considered indecorous

Test Your Knowledge

What was “the Great Chain of Being” as Enlightenment thinkers understood it?

a. a guide to proper behavior and decorumb. the historical royal lineagec. part of God as a “watchmaker”d. a hierarchy that put everything in its place

Test Your Knowledge

The Enlightenment ideal of decorum suggested that ____________.

a. all subjects were fit for literatureb. all literary genres were equally importantc. literary subjects must be fitted to their appropriate genred. genre was always more important than subject

Test Your Knowledge

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The Norton Anthology

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