PHILOSOPHICAL AND CRITICAL GROUNDWORK

Problematic though it may be, the Aufklärung or Age of Enlightenment is the starting-point of our study. How can it be characterised? Sometimes it seems to epitomise a society developing a new confidence, a new awareness of its own potential: a society ready to solve its own problems by initiative and effort, and evincing a belief in its ability both to achieve and to progress materially and culturally. The pre-Copernican, geocentric world was now replaced by an increasingly confident anthropocentric universe. The new confidence could therefore strike a more iconoclastic note. There was a readiness to question, even to overthrow, the structures – whether of authority or power or dogma – which seemed to have retarded freedom and truth. Generally, the Aufklärung evinced an enquiring and creative spirit – in this respect, as in some others, the heir of the Renaissance. Human reason and will, human feeling and creative energy: on these foundations humankind would build its house, and neither heaven nor hell would prevail against it!

Sometimes, as in the microcosmic Scottish Enlightenment, the resultant picture is gracious and attractive: like Allan Ramsay's picture of David Hume, a figure of light emerging from the darkness.