Enlightenment!

Enlightened thinkers can be understood as secularists because they strongly recommended

• the application of the scientific method to the analysis and understanding of all aspects of human life.

• the rational dismantling of all churches and their competing but empty ideologies.

• a complete stop to all efforts at the reform of justice.

• rigorous state control of all forms of education.

European intellectual life in the eighteenth century was marked by

• growing anti-Semitism and sharper persecution of minorities in universities.

• the emergence of secularization and a search to find the natural laws governing human life.

• sophism and the mockery of past traditions.

• a return of monastic schools and medieval modes of training religious thinkers.

The French philosophes

• flourished in an atmosphere of government support.

• sought no extension of Enlightenment to other disciplines.

• were literate intellectuals who meant to change the world through reason and rationality.

• supported state censorship of ideas contrary to their own.

Isaac Newton and John Locke

• created two antagonistic religious systems of thought.

• provided inspiration for the Enlightenment by arguing that through rational reasoning and the acquisition of knowledge one could discover natural laws governing all aspects of human society.

• claimed that mathematics and science would bring about the cure for the evils of society but only very slowly.

• said the philosophes were the prophets of the future and that their rejection of the Scientific Revolution was justified.

The French philosophes mostly included people from

• the nobility and the middle class.

• the lower class and the lower middle class.

• aristocracy and nobility.

• urban artisans and craftsmen.

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that the best political system in a modern society is one where

• the legislature exercises absolute and unlimited power.

• the king exercises absolute and unlimited power.

• power is divided between the three branches of government.

• the nobility is uninvolved.

The recognized capital of the Enlightenment was

• Berlin.

• London.

• Vienna.

• Paris.

The leader of the Physiocrats and their advocacy of natural economic laws was

• Adam Smith.

• François Quesnay.

• Cesare Beccaria.

• David Hume.

Voltaire was best known for his criticism of

• the separation of church and state.

• religious intolerance.

• Plato and the Greeks.

• Chinese civilization.

An early female philosophe who published a translation of Newton's Principia and who was the mistress of Voltaire was

• Marie Antoinette

• Mary Astell

• Catherine the Great

• the Marquise du Chatelet