The Impact Of The Enlightenment On The Colonies :: American History

The intellectual current know as the Enlightenment deeply touch on the learned clergymen who headed colonial colleges and their students. slightly 1650, some European thinkers began to analyze nature in order to follow the laws governing the universe. They employed experimentation and abstract reasoning to discover usual principles behind phenomena such as the motions of planets and stars, the behavior of f tout ensembleing objects, and the characteristics of light and sound. Above, all Enlightenment philosophers emphasized acquiring knowledge through reason, taking particular(a) delight challenging previously unquestioned assumptions. John Lockes Essay Concerning adult male Understanding disputed the notion that human beings are natural already imprinted with innate ideas. All knowledge, locke asserted, derives form ones thoughtfulnesss of the external world. Belief in witchery and astrology, among other similar phenomena, thus came under attack. The Enlightenment ha d an enormous jar on educated, well to do people in Europe and America. It supplied them with a common vocabulary and a unified view of the world, one that insisted that the beginner 18th century was better, and wiser, than all previous ages. It joined them in a common endeavor, the effort to make sense of Gods orderly creation. Thus American naturalists like John and William Bartram supplied European scientists with information about New orbit plants and animals so that they could be included in newly formulated oecumenic classification systems. Americans interested in astronomy took part in an foreign effort to learn about the solar system by studying a rare occurrence, the transit of Venus across the face of the sunshine in 1769. An example of the Americans participation in the Enlightenment was Benjamin Franklin, who retired from a successful printing business himself to scientific experimentation and public service. His experiments and observation on electricity est ablished the terminology and basic theory of electricity still used today. The experimentation encouraged by the Enlightenment affected the lives of ordinary Americans most dramatically through advances in medicine specifically, the comptroller of smallpox. The Reverend Cotton Mather, the prominent Puritan cleric, learned from his African born slave about the benefits of inoculation (deliberately infecting a person with a cushy case of a disease) as a protects against smallpox. When Boston in 1720-1721 suffered a major small pox epidemic, Mather urged the adoption of inoculation despite vicious opposition from the cities leading physician. Mortality rates eventually supported Mather- of those inoculated, clean 3 percent died of other 15 percent.