Candide: Difference between revisions

In history, many things have come about to shape the way we think and believe today. The 18th century was no exception. In the 18th century new ideas and philosophies were popping up everywhere. There was an intellectual movement in Europe which is now known as as the Enlightment. This movement started to change the way the common man viewed his world and everything in it. This time period is also known as the Age of Reason. Isaac Newton introduced the idea that the universe was governed by set laws that were also able to be discovered. This concept was detremental to the way people had prevously thought, because it undermined the faith in a personal God. Newton is most famous for his discovery of gravity. It was believed by many philosphers, such as Voltaire, that churches should not interfere with scientific research. If churches did interfere, however, this could somehow sway the findings in the scientific community. By swaying the findings, the scientists could lean more heavely on the common beliefs of the church, rather than on their research findings, which may suggest otherwise. This may have quite possibly been the first pretense to the seperation of church and state. By the end of the 1700's, the idea of self-government had changed in England and started a revolution in France and America. Europe moved from an rural farming economy to an industrial one. At the end of this century the known world had changed dramatically as the advances in science, political democracy, and religious freedom washed away the last traces of the Middle Ages (Gunnels & Sutton "Background").