How did the scientific revolution contribute to the emergence of the Enlightenment ?What new ideas about the power and potential of human reason were central to bothdevelopments?

Question

How did the scientific revolution contribute to the emergence of the Enlightenment?

What new ideas about the power and potential of human reason were central to both developments?

Answer 1

The scientific revolution introduced (or actually re-introduced from Classical Roman and Greek ideas) the concept of a scientific method of discovery and the idea of natural laws. These ideas state the natural world is controlled by certain laws that are absolute, and that we can find those laws through observation and experiment. Gravity is a good example. No matter what I drop, it falls. Because that action happens every single time, it is a natural law. I can find that law through observing that when things are dropped, they fall. Then I do experiments dropping thousands of things from various heights, etc. It happens every time, so gravity is a natural law.

In the Enlightenment, there were new ideas that these natural laws could be applied to less "scientific" events such as human behavior, government, philosophy, history, etc. So these Enlightenment thinkers began to observe things like government, make hypothesis about them, test them, and try to determine laws. An example of this type of law is the "natural rights" of life, liberty, and property that John Locke comes up with. (See the connection in name of natural laws with natural rights - this further shows in the influence of trying to apply science to more social topics). These new ideas about natural rights and other Enlightenment theories lead to the creation of new ideas and styles of government, economics, etc - in fact, this is why those fields are referred to as the Social Sciences; we tried to apply the scientific method to social fields.