The 18th Century—Age of ReasonThe most striking quality of the 18th century was its optimism. It was a time that celebrated the excellence of the human mind. All creation was believed open to scrutiny. Even the descriptive historical titles of the period express the spirit of improvement and progress. Many people of the time thought they were passing through a golden period similar to that of the Roman emperor Augustus. For this reason the name “Augustan” was given to the early 18th century. The century has also been called the Age of Enlightenment. Many writers of the era used ancient Greek and Roman authors as models of style. Hence the period in literature is often described as neoclassic. Merchants and tradesmen achieved tremendous economic power at this time. Scientific discoveries were encouraged. Many important inventions—for example, the spinning jenny, the power loom, and the steam engine—brought about an industrial society. Cities grew in size, and London began to assume its present position as a great industrial and commercial center. In addition to a comfortable life, the members of the middle class demanded a respectable, moralistic art that was controlled by common sense. They reacted in protest to the aristocratic immoralities in much of the Restoration literature.

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At its heart it became a conflict between religion and the inquiring mind that wanted to know and understand through reason based on evidence and proof. Like all historical trends and movements, the Enlightenment had its roots in the past. Three of the chief sources for Enlightenment thought were the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution of the late Middle Ages. The ancient philosophers had noticed the regularity in the operation of the natural world and concluded that the reasoning mind could see and explain this regularity. Among these philosophers Aristotle was preeminent in discovering and explaining the natural world.The birth of Christianity interrupted philosophical attempts to analyze and explain purely on the basis of reason. Christianity built a complicated world view that relied on both faith and reason to explain all reality. The Renaissance, with its revival of classical learning, and the Reformation of the 16th century, which broke up the Christian church, ended the world view that the church had presented for a thousand years. Coupled with these events was the scientific revolution, a modern discipline that soon lost patience with religious quibbling and what was seen as the attempts of churches to hamper progress in thought. Among the leaders of this revolution were Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and—most significant of all—Isaac Newton. It was Newton who explained the universe and who justified the rationality of nature.

Enlightenment: To understand the natural world and humankind's place in it solely on the basis of reason and without turning to religious belief was the goal of the wide-ranging intellectual movement called the Enlightenment. The movement claimed the allegiance of a majority of thinkers during the 17th and 18th centuries, a period that Thomas Paine called the Age of Reason.

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Love and Reason

By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted a new approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body. The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.

End of the EnlightenmentMany of the effects of the Age of Reason persist today, particularly in the respect given to science and in the growth of democracy. Enlightenment thought, however, failed in many respects. It tried to replace a religious world view with one erected by human reason. It failed in this because it found reason so often accompanied by willpower, emotions, passions, appetites, and desires that reason can neither explain nor control. In the end, the adequacy of reason itself was attacked, first by David Hume in his ‘Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding', and later by Immanuel Kant in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason'.

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Most thinkers came to realize that cool and calculating reason is insufficient to explain the variety of human nature and the puzzling flow of history. Late in the 18th century there was already under way a sweeping revolt against the claims of reason, a revolt called Romanticism. This was a conscious rebellion against science, authority, tradition, order, and discipline. Romanticism manifested itself primarily in the arts. It emphasized individuality, subjectivity, the goodness of the natural world, and the irrational.

Love and Reason Continued•Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.•In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable came into fashion.•Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.•Almost any behavior was acceptable as long as emotions were concealed. Even private intimate conversations were stilted with remote and detached words.

 

•The rationalists scorned the gloom of Christianity. They scrapped the church's concept of women as evil, but they often viewed women as ornaments, toys or unreasonable nitwits and still held women as subservient.

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Using the available information, what attitudes and beliefs about family do hypothesize people in the Age of Reason would maintain? Explain why. Give proof.

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Using the available information, what attitudes and beliefs about family do hypothesize people in the Romantic Age would maintain? Explain why. Give proof.

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Why do you suppose Shelley had him write to his sister? What can we infer about Walton’s family? __________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________How does Walton respond to the stranger? In your opinion, why does he respond this way? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________What similarities can you identify between Walton and the stranger? Why are these significant in the context of the era in which Shelley is writing? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________