Rescuing the Human Spirit

Abstract

During the late eighteenth century signs of an intellectual disturbance began to show themselves in English culture, signified at first by little more than a few tremors, experienced within what was otherwise a firmly stable edifice established by exercise of logical reasoning. The work of Isaac Newton had been seen as having set the design of the universe into a mathematically ascertainable pattern, while John Locke had endeavoured to follow this up by seeking an equivalent ordering for the human mind, built up by organizing the sense-impressions with which the external world provided it so as to match Newton’s arrangement.