what were the long term effects of the enlightenment

European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the feed of the "extended 18th hundred" (1685-1815) as part of a campaign referred to by its participants as the Old age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could follow improved through and through rational change.

The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly divine past Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its regulate and the beginning of its declension. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.

The Rude Enlightenment: 1685-1730

The Enlightenment's pivotal 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the French person René Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Its roots are usually derived to 1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Sir Isaac Newton promulgated his "Principia Mathematica" (1686) and John Locke his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689)—two workings that provided the technological, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment's major advances.

Locke argued that imperfect nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained through accumulated experience quite than by accessing some class of outside truth. Sir Isaac Newton's tophus and sensory receptor theories provided the powerful Enlightenment metaphors for precisely measured change and illuminance.

There was no single, unified Enlightenment. Instead, it is possible to speak of the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment and the English, German, Swiss or American Enlightenment. Individual Enlightenment thinkers oft had very different approaches. Locke differed from David Hume, Dungaree-Jacques Rousseau from Voltaire, Lowell Jackson Thomas Thomas Jefferson from Frederick the Great. Their differences and disagreements, though, emerged out of the common Enlightenment themes of rational questioning and belief in procession through dialogue.

The High gear Enlightenment: 1730-1780

Centered along the dialogues and publications of the French people "philosophes" (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot), the High Enlightenment might best be summed up by one historian's summary of Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary": "a pandemonium of clear ideas." Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the creation could be rationally demystified and cataloged. The key signature publishing of the period was Diderot's "Encyclopédie" (1751-77), which brought in collaboration leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human noesis.

It was an age of well-read despots like Frederick the Great, who unified, rationalized and modernized Prussia in 'tween brutal multi-year wars with Oesterreich, and of learned would-Be revolutionaries equal Thomas Robert Treat Paine and Thomas Thomas Jefferson, whose "Declaration of Independence" (1776) framed the American Revolution in terms taken from of Locke's essays.

It was also a time of interfaith (and opposed-religious) innovation, as Christians sought-after to reposition their faith along demythologized lines and deists and materialists argued that the universe seemed to determine its own course without God's intervention. Locke, along with French philosopher Pierre Bayle, began to champion the idea of the separation of Church and State. Secret societies—like the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Rosicrucians—flourished, oblation Continent men (and a couple of women) new modes of fellowship, esoteric usance and reciprocative assistance. Coffeehouses, newspapers and literary salons emerged as early venues for ideas to circulate.

The Late Enlightenment and On the far side: 1780-1815

The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Nirvana imaginativeness of throwing down the grey authorities to make over society along rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its personal ideas and led, a decade later, to the rising slope of Bonaparte. Static, its goal of equalitarianism attracted the admiration of the inchoate feminist Blessed Virgin Wollstonecraft (bring fort of "Frankenstein" writer Mary Shelley) and elysian some the Haitian war of independence and the radical sign interracial inclusivism of Paraguay's first post-independence government.

Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, only 19th-century Liberalism and Classicism—non to mention 20th-century Modernism—all owe a clayey debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.