A Bright Moment - and Only a Moment

The intoxicating optimism of the early Enlightenment was a prairie fire - it flamed up brightly, fueling itself on the rotten fodder that lay before it. It raced across the culture, fanned by the winds of European change. And it died down as quickly as it had sprung up. Enlightenment constructions and prejudices would linger for generations with mixed effect, but the optimism that had inspired its French beginnings lay in a heap some twenty five years after its illustrious birth.

Voltaire was in England in 1726, returning to France in '28 or '29. Details are scarce about his time there, but we know he was deeply impressed by the English mood, especially with regard to religious toleration, political reform, and physical science. He witnessed Newton's funeral, where "...a mathematician was buried with the honors of a king". He and his contemporaries succeeded in importing something of this society into France during the next two decades; the happy effects and the unlimited potential of the new philosophy provided an impetus which was received worldwide - and especially in colonial America.

Here are comments from Christine North in her introduction to Voltaire's Candide:

...men were at length acquiring enough knowledge to throw off the fetters of ignorance and superstition which had so long weighed them down, and were ready to gain control over their environment and themselves. If they could, through the works of Newton, explain the apparently unfathomable movement of matter by a few simple physical laws, and with Locke move toward a rational analysis of the mysterious mind of man, why should they not learn to understand and control their own nature, and then their own surroundings?

Men rose in their own estimation. As they made more discoveries and arrived at explanations of what had been inexplicable, so they criticized more and more the old way of life, the so-called Ancien Regime, with its oppressive religious, political and philosophical bases...

This criticism, so effectively developed, would acquire a life all its own, and the echoes of its shouts would sound around the world for decades. The optimism, based on the superficiality of the human self, died an uneasy death. The tombstone might well site November 1, 1755 as the day it died.