The Enlightenment. The cultural movement known as the Enlightenment emerged in the late seventeenth century as a reaction against two dominant institutions: the Roman Catholic Church and the absolutist French monarchy of Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715). Stressing the primacy of reason over faith, Enlightenment thinkers drew on the advances of an earlier European Scientific Revolution, particularly the great shift in the Western conception of nature that took place in the seventeenth century, when scholars began to abandon the practice of explaining the natural world by reading and interpreting the works of ancient writers such as Aristotle and instead based their theories on firsthand observations of natural phenomena. Enlightenment thinkers developed the view that the universe functioned like a machine and followed a set of laws that humans were capable of discovering. Their search for knowledge was wedded firmly to the goal of spreading existing learning as widely as...