100 Hallmarks of the Enlightenment

100 Hallmarks of The Enlightenment Encyclopedic Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment: The State of the Art in 18th Century France 100 titles in circa 1,275 volumes One Hundred Hallmarks of The Enlightenment For the major civilisations of the world, the eighteenth century was a crucial period in their historical development. This was particularly true of the great cultures from one end to the other of the Eurasian continent, from Western Europe and the Middle East to Persia and India, of China and in its wake, of Japan in the farmost East. The period witnessed an extraordinary expansion in all fields of spiritual and material culture, a deep modification of political and social awareness, of religious beliefs, of mores and lifestyles. Moreover, at least in Western Europe, these changes were brought about and accompanied by rapidly advancing scientific progress and technical inventions. Widespread as this transformation undoubtedly was, this is not to say that the reshaping of the traditional worldview was everywhere, and in all fields, as radical as it was in France, where the dawn of spiritual Enlightenment was overshadowed towards the end of the same century by the terrors of the social Revolution. History rides on the flow of time, and "science" as we understand it now—and which in this acceptation dates from the middle of the nineteenth century only—is the product not of a sudden rupture but of a slow and far from linear evolution that extends throughout the Modern Period, commencing with the Renaissance in the fifteenth and reaching an erstwhile peak at the end of the eighteenth century. From their stem down to their very roots, the new, the modern, sciences can yet be traced much further back, nourished by the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages, drawing their sap from the Arab, the Middle and Far Eastern traditions, deriving their momentum from the fertile soil of the antique Roman and Greek civilisations. Most of these "hallmarks" of the age of Enlightenment are indeed either updates of publications of the previous century, or subsequent editions that extend into the first quarter of the nineteenth century. From its very origins—and this couldn’t be more true anywhere else than in China— science has gone hand in hand with "culture" ( 文), based on the written word. Writing is the basis and the instrument of scientific work. The men of the Renaissance, turning up hitherto unknown texts and translating them, revived in Europe long forgotten intellectual and spiritual traditions. The impact of these would nevertheless have been incomparably less great, had not a new invention, printing, made possible the widespread diffusion of the ancient texts, thus fertilising newly broken ground. The extraordinary achievements of the eighteenth century went hand in hand with, and depended on, the development of the book, of printing and publishing. On the same level as the text, drawing had, since the Renaissance, come to play an increasingly important part in the comprehension and diffusion of scientific thought. As Cuvier emphasized, the natural sciences and anatomy, as they existed in his time, would have been impossible without the art of drawing, without the woodcuts and copper engravings especially made for book illustration. After all, the 35-volume Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, with a total of 74,000 entries by some 170 contributors, published over a good quarter of a century, owes its reputation as the greatest editorial undertaking not least to its 11 (and finally 12) volumes containing well over three thousand plates intended to illustrate all aspects of "des sciences, des arts et des métiers." Rather than being an adjunct to the text, drawing had become an art and a science of its own, the driving force of Enlightenment in its scientific dimension. Indeed, woodcuts and copper engravings had become indispensable for the perusal and understanding of texts dealing with natural history and architecture in particular, but also with topography, military and marine technologies, handicrafts, agriculture, gardening and so forth. No wonder then that the century is famous for its lavishly produced volumes of folio and quarto size, on subjects of science as well as of literature, many of which were illustrated by artists, painters and engravers of great renown. The situation in China and Japan, in the same eighteenth century, is to some degree similar, though not without major differences. The "Compilation of books ancient and modern" ( Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成), the only encyclopedia produced during the Qing dynasty (printed in movable type in 1728), is, relatively speaking, comparable to the Encyclopédie —though much greater in size, as it consists of 32 sections, 6109 subsections, 10,000 chapters, of more than 800,000 pages and some one hundred million characters. Initiated during the reign of Emperor Kangxi (1662-1722), it took several decades to complete and, what is more, is also fully illustrated (an exception in the Chinese context). On the other hand, the fundamental differences between the two are symptomatic of the respective cultures of which each may be considered the magnum opus. The Tushu jicheng is the epitome of the leishu ( 類書), anthologies rather than encyclopedias, composed of often lengthy citations from—if not entire copies of—major works of the past: a feature which certainly accounts for the gigantic volume of many of the kind. Classified in a systematic set of categories, leishu are encyclopedic in the sense that they may comprise the entire realm of knowledge at the time of compilation, albeit limited to a few fields only that belong to the class of natural history. The genre counts hundreds of examples going back to the early third century (as, in Europe, Pliny's Natural History of the first century) It differs from the Encyclopédie insofar as the latter is by and large a new creation, since each one of the articles not only synthesizes the state of the knowledge of the time, as far as material facts are concerned, but also expresses the personal, often highly critical and controversial opinion of its individual author pertaining to matters spiritual and philosophical. Whereas the anticlerical, if not openly atheist, stance of the encyclopedists earned their work severe censorship and even prohibition, the argumentation of the Chinese anthologies was from the very beginning based on the absolute authority of "precedents," historical facts recorded in the writings of the past and presented as examples of natural laws and principles to be followed forever. The second essential difference is that the undertaking and publication of the Encyclopédie was in every respect a private, commercial, enterprise, in the edition of which neither the royal court nor even less the Church participated or had a say, whereas most of the Chinese anthologies were compiled on imperial command, for political, administrative or social reasons. This accounts for several other disparities, such as the number of copies issued—64 complete sets only of the Tushu jicheng , destined for the princes and some rare meritorious literati subjects, compared to the more than 4000 sets for the first printing of the Encyclopédie —indeed to some 24,000 copies altogether, if one includes the several editions published in other countries. Such was the public aimed at, finally, given that the smaller and cheaper quarto editions were produced with the ordinary citizen in mind. The Encyclopédie, true to its title, assigns great importance to the connection between the sciences and the arts. In the spirit of the times, the progress of mankind follows from technical improvement. But the inventory of the potential resources, like the invention of techniques and machines themselves, requires knowledge and understanding about nature and its workings. This realisation gives rise to the idea that science can contribute to the material improvement of humanity. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, industries begin to benefit from the applications of chemistry and mechanics. The development of mechanisation, even if not proceeding directly from the natural sciences, finds therein support and inspiration. The history of the steam engine illustrates the complex relationship, and the close ties, existing between economic incentives, technical progress and the development of physics. Proof is that the century of spiritual enlightenment is also the century of all the major technical inventions that would shape the future of European civilisation: the steam engine, the automobile, the mechanised weaving loom, the lightning conductor and electricity, the gasometer, the railway, the automaton, the hot-air balloon, the marine chronometer—to speak only of mechanical devices. The adventure of the great discoveries of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, driven at the outset by political and religious incentives but increasingly motivated by commercial gain, was also technical and scientific. It required significant perfection in scores of related fields, such as shipbuilding (carpentry, wood supply and forestry), navigation (involving mathematics, astronomy, instrumentation, cartography, geography), mobilising theoretical as well as practical know-how. On opening up to the exterior, Europe, and the intelligentsia, was undergoing a decisive transformation of its worldview. The publishing in book form of the travels undertaken for political, diplomatic, religious, commercial, exploratory and, last but not least, scientific reasons, made

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