The Western Civilization Essay Example for Free

The Western Civilization Essay Ideas are not only products of the people who formulate them. They are also consequences of history, class, and culture. At the same time, ideas formulated by a certain group of people can in good time go on to shape and influence history, class and culture. The ideas of Enlightenment implied an attitude, a method of thought. They encouraged an orientation of mind that seeks to reexamine and question all received ideas and values, to explore new ideas in many different directions, discovering the truth through the observation of nature. These ideas of the Age of Enlightenment went on to mould the fundamental cultural orientation of the Western world. The Enlightenment left a lasting heritage for the 19th and 20th centuries. It marked a key stage in the decline of the church and the growth of modern secularism. It served as the model for political and economic liberalism and for humanitarian reform throughout the 19th-century Western world. It was the watershed for the pervasive belief in the possibility and the necessity of progress that survived, if only in attenuated form, into the 20th century. The cause of science and scientific thinking had been prospering since the time Copernican Revolution, however, a scientific attitude did not sink in to the masses. It was only in the eighteenth century that the views of thinkers and philosophers began to percolate into the mindsets of common people. Already, by the later decades of the eighteenth century the movement started Enlightenment was ringing triumphant in Europe and America. It would gather momentum in the times that are to follow, becoming a sweeping tide of opinion, assuming a broad front, and determining the course of the Western civilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was this passion of a group of thinkers for reason and science that laid the groundwork for modern social and cultural ethos of the Western Civilization.