The Anti-Enlightenment Mentality in the Law

Abstract

If Europe imagined the Enlightenment, it was America that realized 
it [1]. In one of his many letters to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams 
wrote that "the 18th century, notwithstanding all its errors and 
vices, has been, of all that are past, the most honorable to human 
nature [2]." The period from the last quarter of the 16th Century 
through the end of the 18th Century has often been characterized 
as "The Enlightenment." During this period, various philosophers 
began the intellectual detachment from medieval scholasticism and 
its mystical base [3]. The result was an emphasis on an empiricism 
that supported what was viewed as a healthy skepticism. The 
leaders of this movement included such writers as Copernicus, 
Galileo, John Locke, David Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and 
scientists such as Benjamin Franklin. Collectively, particularly 
in the 18th Century, they were known as philosophes and were 
acknowledged as the intellectual leaders of the time. Their work 
began with inquiry into the natural sciences and its extension into 
politics and economics that were at least as impactful. While it is 
easy to suggest that they were anti-clerical, indeed to some extent 
hostile to religion, that sells them short. It is true that they did 
not concern themselves with extensive religious debates, but they 
never completely divorced thought from its traditional religious 
origins. They simply went beyond it in their thought process, 
driven as it was with an emphasis on the distinction between 
what is "material" and "mental or ideal". Put another way, the 
"empirical" view of the philosophes was grounded in observation 
of factually definable phenomena. Samuel Johnson pointed this out 
in the act of kicking a stone as a means to refute the arguments of 
Bishop Berkeley as to what exists and what does not [4].