The Enlightenment, The Romantic Rebellion, The Industrial Age, The Nature Conservation Movement, The Twentieth Century and Total War

Abstract

The period of the Enlightenment was dominated by Newton’s mechanistic view of Nature. As we have seen, the poet Alexander Pope spoke of Newton’s discoveries, perhaps with a certain tinge of irony, in quasi-divine terms, as comparable to the original Creation. But despite the general sense that Newton’s physics had convincingly explained the workings of the universe as a sort of vast machine following universal laws, some of the key thinkers of the Enlightenment put forward alternative ideas.