Key+Ideas+of+the+Enlightment.

The Scientific Revolution was a great part of how the Enlightenment came together. The Enlightenment was brought on many new questions and ideas to the world. All philosophers wanted to equip the government with the scientific method. For the most part, the “enlightenment” was a rejection of the Catholic Church. The religious conflicts and tolerance in the 16th and 17th century disgusted all intellectuals and they brought on the new ideas of the Scientific Revolution.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant described the Enlightenment as “man’s leaving behind his self-caused immaturity” and he believed that the earlier periods of time were human’s inability to “use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another”. His motto of the Enlightenment was “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence”. That was basically the main idea of the Enlightenment: to use our sense of reason on every institution and every system.

These thinkers and philosophers were trying to use this sense to see the tyranny. This age rotated around three main ideas: individualism, relativism, and rationalism. Individualism helped people recognize the importance of their existence and that everything mattered. Relativism is to merit that all ideas and cultures should be treated equally. Rationalism is for people to believe that with the help of reason and logic, we can find answers and learn the truth ourselves. The philosophers of this era did not believe in a monarchy. They believed that people should be able to choose who’s going to govern them because we have the intelligence and reason to do so. They believed in, as quoted from the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.