Daisy’s Reviews > The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries > Status Update

If, as Locke taught, one's knowledge, beliefs, and moral ideas are bounded and determined by one's experience, then it follows absolutely that one's sense of the world, one's values, and one's beliefs about things are relative to time, place, and personal experience.

Montesquieu in the Persian Letters and Voltaire in his "philosophical tales" increasingly speak for the consensus emerging in the French Enlightenment.
Science is a unifying truth amid the relativities of perspective. Our common ground is set by nature's reality principle, not by human wish. For both Montesquieu and Voltaire, an awareness of relativism should lessen national and religious pride. For both, that awareness should promote tolerance and move us toward what we have in common as human beings: empirical science, the recognition of natural needs and consequences, and worship of the author of nature.

Voltaire urges the French to recognize the superiority of Locke to Descartes.
He asserts the superiority of empiricism over rationalism as a means of acquiring knowledge of the world from the world….. Voltaire criticizes theologians who claim that Locke and other philosophers threaten morality and society. He holds that the theologians themselves have bred discord and war. Voltaire lauds Newton's application of Lockean empiricism to the study of nature.

Bishop Joseph Butler used the essentialistic model of human "nature," in his Fifteen Sermons on Humane Nature, to argue that before and independent of Christian revelation, our natural knowledge and the ordinary tendencies of our human nature lead us to virtue. We must examine and analyze our purposeful design in order to know our nature. Our essence is to pursuit happiness, governed naturally by reason and conscience…. Thus deism and new philosophical Christianity moved on the same tidal current of conceptual change. Deism did not alter new philosophical Christianity but simply naturalized categorically the religious component of the pursuit of happiness.