The Enlightenment Quotes

“Philosophy itself should not be merely "the pursuit of the knowledge of the truth" but should offer a practical guide for ordinary people in their everyday lives.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“One can define this virtue,” he wrote, “as love of the laws and of the homeland [patrie].”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“Chinese were not simply great craftsmen and ingenious designers, they were also a deeply moral people. Ethics was their true strength, and theirs was an ethics that crucially eschewed metaphysical or theological speculation and adhered to education and conversation.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“human nature” had, of course, been going on for some time. The earliest examples of “natural men” had been the American Indians. It had been they who had provided Montaigne with much of the material he had used to cast doubt on the civility and humanity of his Christian contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and to suggest that, after all, “barbarian” might be nothing more than a word we use to describe what is unfamiliar to us.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“Both Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim and Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind end with general outlines for a future state of mankind. (Condorcet’s longer text, which was never completed, would have been overwhelmingly concerned with such prospects.) Rousseau’s Social Contract is similarly a project for a future possible state, a means to provide for a creature who was born free but is now “everywhere in irons,” the closest moral equivalent to the perfect equality of the state of nature.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“It was, after all, Voltaire who was reputed to be the source of the famous quip that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him, if only because, so long as his wife, his tailor, his lawyer, and his servants could be persuaded to believe in the threat of punishment in an afterlife, “I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often.”49”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“Most of the philosophers of the seventeenth century hovered somewhere in between. Most were prepared to accept the evidence of their senses as possibly flawed and easily misled but nevertheless the only handle we have on reality. (This is known as “sensationalism.”) Then there was the certainty of the knowing, reasoning person himself. What if, asked Descartes, “I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it follow from that that I, too, do not exist?” No, he answered—because “if I have convinced myself of something then I must certainly exist.” From this he concluded “that this proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived by my mind.”24 This form of reasoning, which was subsequently turned into the famous Latin phrase Cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—became one of the touchstones of the new philosophy. Not many Skeptics went so far as to doubt the existence of the world. But Descartes’s point is much the same as both Montaigne’s and John Donne’s: The only things of which I can be certain must come directly from the individual in his or her immediate and direct contact with the external world. The implications for the traditional Christian view of the world of even a moderate form of this kind of skeptical reasoning could be devastating.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“The Peace of Westphalia made possible the modern “Europe of Nations.” It also drew a curtain across the continent, between a Catholic south and a predominantly Protestant north, which has remained until this day. Over time the north, which had once been poor, backward, and agrarian, would become rich, innovative, and urban, and the south, in particular Italy, Spain, and Portugal, which had for centuries been the most powerful, inventive, and wealthy regions of Europe, would gradually decline to become frail, impoverished shadows of their former selves, a position from which Italy only began to emerge in the nineteenth century and Spain and Portugal in the late twentieth. Only France, poised midway between the two and, although overwhelmingly”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“Toleration—or what today is called “negative toleration,” the willingness to accept the continuing existence of those you know to be wrong—is, Mill knew, “admitted with tacit reserves” by “almost all religious persons” in “even the most tolerant countries.”16 It was not the recognition of error or any willingness to accept the possible validity of divergent opinions that had ultimately compelled the Christian churches in Europe to relinquish their hold over the judgment of the individual. It was defeat on the battlefield.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“The trouble with this, in MacIntyre’s opinion, was that all the insistence on the primacy of reason and of “rational debate” had ever achieved was to have erased from men’s minds what, since Aristotle, had been the main support for their entire moral, intellectual, and political lives: the concept of virtue. And it had given them nothing in return. Their intellectual “light” was, in fact, nothing other than moral darkness.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“Whatever else we may also be discussing, “enlightenment” was a concern with the understanding of the historical evolution of the human mind.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

“Christianity—which for so long had kept their cringing adherents trapped in a state of “slavery without hope and a perpetual infancy,” would finally be revealed for the lies, tricks, and deceits that they were.”
― Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters