Enlightenment Terms

Here are some terms for you, Mr. Lemons (sorry that I'm late, I didn't know)

Enlightenment: A time whon people discover the world. There were advances in science, politics and the social stuff. These people did not believe in the church's ideas.

Scientific Revolution: A time that changed Europe greatly. Enlightened people founded new scientific stuff (new for them, not for us), such as the heliocentric theory and gravity.

Copernicus: A famous Polish mathematician and astronomer. He was famous for proving Aristotle wrong about the geocentric theory (Earth was the center of the universe).

John Locke: An English thinker. He believed that people had natural rights, which are rights belonging to all humans when they were born. These rights include life, liberty and property. He was against monarchy.

Montesquieu: A French thinker. He believed that one way to protect liberty is to divide the government into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. He also came up with the idea of checks and balances in the government.

Voltaire: A famous French thinker. He was against inequality, injustice, superstition, the slave trade and prejudice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A French philosopher. He believed that society limited people's behavior. He suggested that only freely-elected governments can impose some controls and weaken their power. He also thought that the good of the community, as a whole, must go before personal interests.

Thomas Paine: An American propagandist (what does the word mean, I don't really know). He helped in the American Revolution. He wrote a book called Common Sense. In his book, The Age of Reason, he put that the Bible was not created from God's own words and he did not believe in Christianity.

Common Sense: One of Thomas Paine's famous works. In this book, Paine challenged Britain and monarchy. He also, in his book, asked politely to Great Britain for independence.