This, in a word, was the philosophy of Voltaire and his intellectual circle—and that word could be “progress,” “improvement,” “reason,” or “enlightenment,” depending on where you prefer the emphasis. The principle of “light,” embedded in the last of these, became the source of names later used to designate such thinkers and their views in several European languages: les lumières in French, Aufklärung in German, illuminismo in Italian, the Enlightenment in English. Few of the thinkers used these labels of themselves, but they did tend to use a language of light and darkness—a language
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