To round out these superlatives we may add that, all in all, the seventeenth century was the most productive in the history of modern thought. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibniz: here was a majestic sequence of men warm with the wine of reason, joyfully confident (most of them) that they could understand the universe, even to forming “clear and distinct ideas” about God, and leading—all but the last—to that heady Enlightenment which was to convulse both religion and government in the French Revolution.
