The 18th Century:

In general there is a strong sense of living in a world that is vastly different from what came before

Specifically, the intellectuals and elites of the 18th century gave their age a name: Italian -- illuminati; French -- lumiere; German --Aufklärung; and in English -- Enlightenment [aka: The Age of Reason]. In 1784, the 60 year old Immanual Kant (1724-1804) published a brief essay in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the official mouthpiece of the German Enlightenment. Kant's essay was called, Was ist Aufklärung? Kant began the essay in the following way:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed [immaturity or] nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind without another's guidance. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know! Have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment

But what did he understand about 'guidance'? It began with a rejection of the old order [aka: ancien regime] -- things as they had been and in many places still were-- was characterized by a

• semi-feudal society and economy, social divisions of the population into orders and estates with limited mobility,
• religious intolerance, enthusiasm, fanaticism and superstition,
• royal absolutism and
• government corruption.

Intellectuals throughout Europe were suspicious of that old order and the very name they chose to describe their expectations is embodied in that word, enlightenment. Note: science, philosophy, literature and philology not separated.

The venue of their agitation was not the university, but the academy. The former was still very much creature of the old order. Note that the academies were supported by royal and aristocratic patronage, as well as by a wealthy and educated commercial elite.

The 18th was marked by enormous number of scientific discoveries, and by the inventions that initiated the Industrial Revolution. Such as:
* Machine Drill for planting seeds (1701), invented by Jethro Tull
* Cotton Gin (1793), invented by Eli Whitney (1765-1825)
* Marine Chronometer, invented by John Harrison
* improved Steam Engines,(1780's) invented by James Watt and Thomas Newcomen
* Three-color Printing, invented by Jacob Cristoph Le Blon (1710)
* Flying Shuttle Loom, invented by John Kay (1733), driven by water power in most cases.

IMPORTANT: This period is similar to the great period of Greek science in that

• there is one language for scholarship --Latin; Galileo's use of the vernacular Italian was a rarity;
• the universe was perceived to be ordered and knowable
• in constrast to the middle ages, there was a relatively high level of education (recall the Jesuit Stations for example; and the support for schools everywhere)
• trade, commerce and manufacturing had created a class of educated people who, lacking noble descent, sought now to display or profile their excellence / learning / success by participating in and supporting scientific studies and ventures. Benj. Franklin is the classic case
• secular authorities, anxious to escape theological control, established royal societies / academies. These bodies supported research and the publication and circulation of scholarship.
• scientific ideas were discussed widely in acadmies, salons, and in publications [see below],

The major difference was that technological progress especially in the realm of labor saving devises (like the printing press, which produced new scholarship inexpensively, and the development of a postal system that circulated informantion widely.

The world in 1680 and in 1814 ; it was also a world that valued symmetry, harmony and balance...products of well ordered minds.

It was a turbulent century for politics, both national and imperial. The Parliament of Scotland merged with the Parliament of England to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain. There were wars between the empires of Austria, France, Great Britain, and Spain. Some of these were known as the French and Indian War, but in Europe it was the war of Habsburg Succession, the war of the Spanish Succession
It was also a time of revolution, including most notably: the French Revolution (1789) and the American Revolution (1775).

Major publications... most of these were published with the financial support of academies or by wealthy individuals seeking to make a name for themselves as patrons of art and science.

1700: Joseph de Tournefort's "Institutiones rei herbariae" is a magnificently illustrated three-volume work on Mediterranean plant life .
1702: David Gregory's "Astronomiae physicae et geometriae elementa" becomes the first astronomy textbook based on the principles of gravity. Francis Hauksbee's "Physico-mechanical experiments" describes how low-pressure air with an electrical discharge passing through it glows with a lovely light. And: The "Daily Courant" of London begins, the first daily newspaper.
1704: John Harris' "Lexicon technicum" defines roughly 8,000 scientific terms. Antonio Maria Valsalva publishes "De aure humana tractatus", the first book on the anatomy, physiology, and diseases of the human ear.
1705: Edmund Halley's "Synopsis astronomiae cometicae" correctly predicts the 1758 return of the comet last seen in 1682, which thereafter becomes known as Halley's Comet.
1707: John Floyer's "The physician's pulse watch" brings pulse-rate counting to medical practice; in an early profitable use of merchandising, he sells a special watch to go with the book.
1712: Giovanni Ceva's "De re numeraria" (Concerning Money Matters) is the first significant and readable application of Mathematics to Economics.
1713: William Deham's "Physico-theology, or a demonstration of the being and attributes of God, from his works of creation" tries to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, to use the phrase famous in the cynical 1759 satire "Candide" by Voltaire. Jacques (Jakob) Bernoulli's "Ars conjectandi" (the conjectural arts) is a posthumously published treatise on Probability. It includes what we call Bernoulli's Theorem, a version of the Law of large Numbers, which is the first published application of calculus to Probability Theory.
1723: Jacob Leupold's "Theatrum machinarum generale" begins publication of what will eventually be nine volumes. This is the first systematic analysis of Mechanical Engineering. It includes, ahead of its time, a design for a high-pressure noncondensing steam engine, the likes of which were not built until the early 1800s.
1725: John Flamsteed's "Historia coelestis Brittanica", in official complete edition, is published in a posthumous three-volume edition. It catalogs the position of almost 2,884 stars and thus replaces Kepler's catalog.
1726 Swift, Gulliver: Part III: In this, the most Science Fictional, Gulliver makes sport of the vain endeavors of scientists and philosphers by telling about Laputa, where men forget all common sense and concern themselves with speculative philosophy. In Lagado, the flying sialnd, he sees scientists engaged in all sorts of foolish pursuits, one being the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers.
1728: Pierre Fauchard's "Le chirurgien dentiste, ou traite des dentes" is the first genuinely scientific treatise of dentistry, and describes tin, lead, and gold fillings.
1731: Ludvig Holberg, comic playwright in Denmark (26 plays total), publishes "Erasmus Montanus", science fictional in its attention to the conflict between the technically educated (prone to pedantry and the "vapid formalism of logic") and the ignorant but common-sensical man. Rasmus Berg, educated at the University in Copenhagen, knows (for example) that the world is round, but is ridiculed when he returns to his home town, where even his wealthy father-in-law-to-be knows that the Earth is "flat as a pancake." In the end, Rasmus pretends to believe the Earth is flat, and so wins the daughter's hand in marriage.
1731: The government of Austria commissions a study on the customs and legends of the peasants, after an episode of mass hysteria in the village of Medvegia. Johannes Fluckinger writes extensively about the legends of the Vampire, and his report is a great topic of conversation for decades to come, and influences 'horror literature' forever after.
1732: The most popular and translated treatise on Chemistry of its day, "Elementa Chemiae" is published by Hermann Boerhaave. He similarly studied the conservation of mass under chemical reactions, studied thermal capacity (following a suggestion by Farenheit) and generally led the way to a quantitative view of the natural world.
1734: Voltaire's "Lettres Anglaises ou philosophiques" is the first French language book introducing Isaac Newton's mechanics
1734: Rene de Reaumur's "Memoirs pour servir a l'histoire des insects" is one of the books that founds the science of Entomology.
1735: Leonard Euler's "Petersburg Commentaries" introduces the mathematical notation for functions: f(x).
1734: George Berkeley's "The analyst: or a discourse addressed to an infidel mathematician" slams Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton's Calculus (which Newton called "Fluxions"). George Berkeley poetically attacks infinitesimals as: neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities? Attack on a theory of mathematics by branding it implicitly as supernatural. Yet he was correct, in the sense that it was not until the 1960s that the methodology of "non-standard analysis" gave a rigorous account of infinitesimals, which were an ad hoc notion for over two centuries beforehand.
1735: Carolus Linnaeus' "Systema naturae" presents the system of classification of organisms which is still used in the 21st century.
1735: Francesco Algarotti's "Newtonianismo per la dame" (Newtonianism for the Ladies) becomes one of the most popular books of science writing about Newton's theories of Light and Optics.
1736: Leonhard Euler first used the letter "e" to represent the base of natural logarithms, already in his in correspondence in 1727.
1737: John Colson's English translation of Isaac Newton's "De methodis serierum at fluxionem" ("the method of Fluxions and Infinite Series") is the first version published of Newton's mathematics (which we call "Calculus") although Newton did the work in originally in 1671.
1737: Pieter van Musschenbroek's "Essai du physique" is one of the earliest books to use the word "Physics" instead of "Natural Philosophy" or "Experimental Philosophy", even though the word "Physics" in this sense goes all the way back to Aristotle.1739: Daniel Bernoulli's "Hydrodynamica" describes the relationship between the velocity and pressure of a fluid, and more deeply analyses this theorem (which we call Bernoulli's Theorem) in terms of the impact of atoms on the walls of the chamber containing the flowing fluid.
1739: Pierre de Maupertuis' "Sur la Figure de la Terre" contains the measurements that he made in lapland, which confirm that the earth is flattened at the poles (and thus relatively bulges out at the equator).
1742: Henry Baker's "Microscope made easy": how a layman can build and use a microscope.
1744: Some have claimed that German astronomer Eberhard Christian Kindermann wrote the first credible space travel novel, "Die geshwinde Reise auf dem Luft-schiff nach der obern Welt, welche jungsthin funf Personen angestellet (1744). It deals with a trip to Mars.
1752: Voltaire publishes "Micromegas", with Earth being visited by aliens from Saturn and Sirius. This is perhaps the first book about Aliens On Earth.
1767: "History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments" by Joseph Priestley, popular work of science which got many amateurs tinkering with electrical items, leading to, for instance, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein."
1768: "Encyclopedia Brittanica" begins publication as a series of weekly issues
1778 Chemisches Journal, thought to be the first chemical journal, is established by Lorenz von Crell. Published 1778-84, subsequently renamed Chemische Annalen and published 1784-1803. It already included some abstracts.
1781: French author De la Bretonne's "Decouverte Australe, par un Homme-Volant" includes, amazingly enough, aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, ICBMs, atomic energy, germ warefare, and communal versus authoritarian cultures.
1787 Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique, by Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Claude Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François de Fourcroy, is published in Paris. Created from Greek and Latin roots, the nomenclature system represents what Lavoisier's followers understand about the composition of hundreds of substances.
1790: Reverend Samuel Deane's (1733-1814) "The New England Farmer; or Georgical Dictionary", published (Worcester, MA) with help from American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Reverend Samuel Deane performed agricultural experiments and compiled drew upon American and European background knowledge.
1796. Jakob Sturm publishes his index of insects. Note who pays for the publication!
1797: The Medical Repository began publication in New York as the first such commercial (i.e. independent) publication in the United States to be devoted to Science (as well as Medicine). The journal included developments in Europe as well as in the United States.
1798: "The Essay on the Principle of Population" by Thomas Robert Malthus is one of the most important early studies of Dystopia really, really bad futures (opposite of "Utopia"). Since population tends to multiply faster than subsistence, many people will starve unless society adopts rigid population controls, such as sexual abstinence and prohibition of marriage among the poor. He was specifically attacking the Utopian writings of such as Godwin, father of Mary Shelley ("Frankenstein").
1798: Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) (1753-1814) "An Experimental Inquiry Concerning the Source of Heat Which Is Excited by Friction" [in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society] describes his experiments with boring cannons, and convincingly argued against the Caloric theory of heat in favor of one based on motion. An essential step in the birth of Thermodynamics.

Significance:

• Science and the public; the importance of public discussion and circulation of knowledge
  • publications to explain science to the educated and to the less educated (those without Latin). Note the inclusiveness implicit in the books devoted to such subjects as explaining science for women [a best seller], how to build your own microscope; also the role of satire and science fiction. These publications attempted to bring new ideas to a broader public, but also reflect a profound concern about the effect of science on human beings...!
  • Publication of the seminal handbooks for most disciplines: math, astronomy, entomology, botany, mechanical engineering, physics, even dentistry and medicine.
  • Tho not yet fully realized in this century, there was a notable focus now on the potential for using scientific knowledge to improve the standard of living. It was rather a period of science conducted for its own sake.
  • Most machines are still driven by wind and water; few by fossil fuels
• Support for science: foundation of academies. Royal patronage. But also the important role of the dilettantes like Sturm in publishing their own findings. Importance of commercial prosperity; something we have seen in ancient Greece and in the Renaissance, but now deeper and broader.
• The Enlightenment ideals on the role of liberty and its understanding of Natural Law contributed significantly to the end of serfdom and political reform, in some places violently (France), in others more peacefully (Britain).

In the long run:

Two strains notable: liberation of humans and human rersourcefulness from the constraints of the old order [Ancien Regime] = The Enligthenment, and the notion that by the applications of reason the conditions of human existence may be advanced = enlightenment.

On the former, with a captial E,

• the message played out in three critical documents that focus on a new definition of the relationship between the individual and the collective. All three had revolutionary impacts.
• The notion of freedom from the mercantilistic practices of the British establishment led to the American Revolution and to the adoption of Enligthenment values encapsulated in the notion of 'inalienable rights', 'we the people' [instead of l'état? c'est moi of Louis XIV], in the bill of rights: and in France, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. All three stand in strong contrast to the paternalistsic practices of the Old Order in that they focus instead on popular sovereignty and personal freedom. By the early 19th century, these values were adopted or being adopted throughout much of the Atlantic world, and national elections, the goal of many Enlightenment thinkers, were certainly the norm by the mid 19th century.

On the latter -- with a lower case e [the application 'freedom' and 'reason' to human affairs; the extension of Cartesian and Newtonian science]

• The third document, the Communist Manifesto, understood liberation in terms of a proletatian revolution, where liberty meant the rational allocation of resouces to all, each according to his/her need. Marx and Engels, this was true liberty. As we will see later in the course, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin all justified their [totalitarian] control on the basis of their 'enlightened' or 'rational' allocation work and resources.

Liberty and property. To the intellectuals of the Enligthenment and beyond, these two notions were bound together.

• And reviewing the historical context one can understand why. Given that property in the Old Order was in the hands of 'princes and potentates' and of the 'established church', liberty without property was perceived to be an oxymoron [logically impossible].
• Many economists today perceive that
  • personal freedom, prosperity and private property are closely linked. Those states where private property has been largely suspended, are also those states in which there is little personal freedom and little prosperity. Cases come to mind...
  • Those states that adopted Enlightenment values were manfestly more successful in acquiring and developing the resources needed to enhance the material basis of human life. The standard of living improved dramatically throughout the Atlantic world.

In the last class Greg posed a question: are humans part of/ in parternership with Nature, or distinct from Nature? Collectively (if I read your responses properly) most believe we should be in partnership with nature, yet recognized that we do not always act as if we are. Our values and behavior are not consistent. So too with the Enlightenment. Jefferson could write his immortal words, and yet own slaves; so too the infamous 3/5s compromise. Party bureaucrats in the Soviet Union no doubt believed that they could rationally allocate work and resources. And in creating the New Soviet Man, it did not matter that 'a few eggs were broken'.

The great dilemma we face may not be the values themselves, but understanding what we actually do.