Cult of Reason.

The eighteenth century is often called the Age of Enlightenment, alluding to the movement of thought that spread from France throughout Europe and to North America. The Enlightenment was primarily an intellectual phenomenon, one that broke with traditional ways of thinking about the world. French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, formed a loosely associated group that came to be known as the philosophes. They stressed the importance of reason as the key to knowledge. They rejected more-traditionally religious notions of revelation from God as the source of information about the world and pursued their own inquiries into truth, confident that human reason was the only tool they needed. They began investigating and cataloguing nature and rethinking the questions of the meaning of life, with a new emphasis on the importance of human actors and human thought. Although this cult...