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literature

The idea that increased knowledge and human improvement go together became fundamental to the Enlightenment . Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau not only rejected this idea but proclaimed the opposite stressing the simplicity of nature over the artificiality of society feeling and faith over doubt and rationalism , and the freedom of individual genius over hard and fast aesthetic rules . It was his philosophy that took the rationalism of the Enlightenment and evolved it to revolutionary results and ushered in the era of Romanticism

With the foundation laid by Descartes , Galileo , Copernicus , the emergence

of modern science and the scientific method , the eighteenth century saw a new approach to human experience and understanding . With the concept of scriptural revelation becoming superfluous in the Enlightenment in favor of scientific understanding , the spirit of empirical observation encouraged the seventeenth-century natural philosophy of Benedictus de Spinoza and his Ethics , which expounded a monistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one Thomas Hobbes , who contended that people in a state of nature ceded their individual rights to a strong sovereign in return for his protection and Locke , who declared that the state of Nature is the source of all rights and unity , and the purpose of the state is to protect , and not hold back , the state of Nature . Rousseau 's continuation of this newfound natural philosophy set the stage for the cultural , political and artistic revolutions of the Romantic Era and its emphasis on natural laws

In Nature , just as the pre-Enlightenment philosophers and scientists observed the potential for deeper understanding and , religious social , and political , Rousseau saw the potential for a restoration of humanity through a reconnection with the natural world . In 1754 , this understanding became the basis of Rousseau 's Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men . Rousseau 's discourse begins by depicting man in the state of Nature and completes his history of human development with the establishment of large political societies and laws to maintain them . By the middle of the eighteenth century , the philosophy of Rousseau expanded the ideas of natural religion and freedom as the natural state of human existence

In his 1762 work , The Social Contract , Rousseau expanded on the ideas of his predecessors ' natural contract theories , but defined his own version of the contract that humanity has with Nature . Rousseau 's contract theory starts with the opening declaration "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains . One thinks himself the master of others and still remains a greater slave than they (Rousseau 56 . Rousseau believed that in to live in society , human beings agree to an implicit social contract , which gives them certain rights in return for giving up certain freedoms they would have in a state of Nature

With his initial charge that society corrupts humanity made in The Social Contract , Rousseau asserts in Emile that passions conform to natural law in that they are instruments of our freedom they tend to preserve us ' Those passions contrary...

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