The Age of Exuberance

The eighteenth century marked the break in thought between medieval survivals and modern trends. Newtonian science strengthened deism and gave birth to the idea of progress. Aesthetic primitivism adopted the idea of the noble savage. Natural rights and democracy went hand in hand. Classicism and neoclassicism gave way before the impact of science and sentimentalism. America was also influenced by the frontier, Quakerism, political conflicts, and a growing nationalism. This period was marked by the decline of Puritan influence, the rise of Philadelphia, Hartford, and finally New York as literary capitals, and by the appearance of the novel and drama.

The development of empiricism had a great effect upon religious and political thought in America. Newtonian rationalism embodied the following points:

  1. A universe operating by unchanging laws.

  2. A harmonious system.

  3. A benevolent deity.

  4. Man seeking inner harmony corresponding with the cosmos.

  5. Probable immortality.

This scheme was at first used by Cotton Mather and others to re-enforce Biblical revelation.

It was an easy step to deism, which accepted Newtonian assumptions but gave them a different application:

  1. A transcendent God operating by natural law rather than by providential intervention.

  2. A benevolent God.

  3. God revealed in nature, not in the Bible.

  4. Freedom of the will.

  5. Man naturally altruistic.

  6. Men are equal.

  7. Evil is [the] result of corrupt institutions, not of man's natural depravity.

  8. Man is perfected by education.

  9. Humanitarian aid to man is the best service of God.

  10. Distrust of existing religious systems.

Deism was an aristocratic movement until the Revolution, but it then made serious inroads upon religion from 1791 to 1810. Primitivism, the idea that man in the state of nature is superior to man in civilization, was common. Popularized by Rosseau and the Abbe Raynal, the view was conditioned in America by contact with the Indians. The idea of progress was also prevalent in American thought, and Locke's doctrine of natural rights was of primary importance in political development.

Source: Dr. Robert Houston (retired), English Department, Mankato State University (1990).